How to Create Data-Driven Content to Build Trust and Stand Out

How can we make sub pillars around it? So how can we make one podcast out of it? How can we make one live show from it? How can we do maybe like a quarterly Hockey Stack Labs event where we in person in the Bay Area or like New York, whatever we announce, we release a report in person creating those pillars around it and then hosting everything on the flow that we have one single page where you can see everything about Hockey Stack. I think that's going to be the way to scale it. And then the other thing is so far we haven't used this, but I think the flow is a great, great way to support our POV with relevant people from the industry. We see the feature like this. Do you see the same feature? Let's create content together to build the feature of B2B marketing attribution together and then have the Flow support that vision with relevant people from the industry.

Thank you for joining me on the Exit 5 podcast. It's the early morning I saw you just posted yesterday. Good morning from Hockey Stacks New HQ in San Francisco. That that's where you are right now.

Yeah. And that was 11am so that's morning for me.

Usually that was 11am Right now it's 7:52am so this is super, super morning for you. Got to find a way to get your energy up.

I don't know, I just had a special set. I'm excited for this podcast too.

You'll be good. So a couple things we're going to talk about. I want to talk about Hockey Stack, a newer ish company in the B2B SaaS space that seems to be everywhere in the last year, year or so. And I want to talk about that. Early stage marketing is a topic that's always popular with this audience and then also spend some time talking about measurement and attribution. But let's rewind back to the beginning of Hockey Stack. If you could just take me into the. Into the beginning. I don't necessarily want to cover like the founding story of the company, but more so like when you had something and when you decided it was time to go and do marketing. One of the questions that I see come up a lot in the 5 community or from startup marketers is like. Or even a lot of founders listen to this podcast too. Like when do you start marketing? And so what was that process like at Hockey Stack? When did you start?

Yeah, so quick control. Myself, I'm the founder and CRO of Aki Stack. We're doing, as you said, marketing, analytics and attribution. We recently Released ABM and Sales Intelligence a couple weeks. A couple of weeks ago as well. So we are becoming a platform platform, not like one product. So as you said last year, we have grown to be one of the largest platforms in the attribution space right now. Couple billions dollars, Billions of dollars in net new revenues flowing through the platform from our customers, and almost a billion dollars in performance marketing spend is flowing through HockeyStack's platform. And we are using all of this data in our research reports, which is coming out every single week on Tuesday called Hockeystack Labs. So how we decided to do marketing. So I've, I always loved marketing and I've been testing a lot of stuff before Hockey Stack and during Hockey Stack as well. I thought, like the attribution space, there's been different platforms like Bizible. Um, it's a tool that I admire. It's like the legacy attribution platform that most enterprises use. And last time I checked, Drift is using Visible still. If someone at Drift is listening to this podcast, reach out to me. So I, I thought, like, if I just do. I called up on Cold call people, cold email, people do SEO. It's not going to work out because people already know about attribution and everybody hates attribution right now. It's not like I'm launching an AI product that everyone's going to be interested in no matter what I do. I need to be really strategic, interesting, so that people can actually see and then be interested in the product. That's not like an exciting AI product. So what we did is me and my co founder and CEO, we started posting on LinkedIn every single day, twice a day for six months. I said, after six months, if it doesn't work out, you're going to stop. But for six months, we're going to do every single day, two posts. And then at the same time, I.

Have a question, a question on that. Where was the product like, at. At that point, did you have a product that people could sell? Like sign up and sell or. Not yet?

No, we were still building. Okay, okay. So both of my co founders are building the product and I'm talking to users, potential prospects. Me and my co founder, CEO, we're posting every day on LinkedIn for six months. And after six months, six months was like the deadline to launch the product. So after six months, we actually had like a small audience and we had like, I don't know, 35, 40 people that we met from LinkedIn, jumped on a zoom call, had a phone call, met in person, Something like that. So a small in person community and small LinkedIn community at least, like if I do a product launch, I can reach out to 40 people and they would support the product launch.

You're still building the product, you're, you're talking to people. Did you, did you have a content strategy? Like, you know, some, some really like thoughtful thing planned out? We're going to post about this, we're going to do this this day, we're going to post this. Or we kind of just posted anything that came. Came to your mind. How did you, how did you decide to, to what storylines or messaging angles did you decide to, to go after at that stage? I'm asking because I think that's where a lot of people are not sure. Are not sure what to talk about. Did you just go hard on what you were learning from customers talking about attribution and measurement? What was the topic?

Yeah, this is really interesting question because I've not done this for like the last two years or so, so it's interesting to remember how I was doing it. So basically what I was doing was. So I had two posts. One of them was something about the product that we were building or about the attribution or something like that. And the second one is I had a list of people that I thought they were posting interesting things. I was reading those posts and writing my own opinions about the same topic without mentioning them or anything. For example, if you post about lead generous dimension, I was writing a post to your post, but as a separate post, if that makes sense. So you say lichen doesn't make sense.

Basically you were using it as like a prompt to like, okay, what's my opinion on this topic? I love that. That's really smart. And that's also where I think a lot of people get stuck is like, well, what am I going to say? So you just kind of looked around and found interesting and relevant voices in the space that you knew you were going to build in.

Yeah, exactly. So Dave would have thought about an idea. If they thought about it. It's probably a good idea. It's probably going to get a lot of comments. It's not true, but yes, I will write something as if this was a conversation. And a lot of those posts actually some of them got viral. So it was a good sign that there's something in there. And then it's not sustainable though. So you can not do that for two years. So it was like just the initial stage and then after that, as he got close to the product launch what we did, and I think every single setup needs to do this. I basically pressured my co founders and our early engineers to at least launch one new feature a week. And at the same time, I hired the designer in house. So basically they were letting me know what we're going to launch the next two weeks. Our designer was doing short videos about the feature and I was pushing them out from our company page. My profile, my co founders, and even at some point, some of our engineers started posting it as well. And then at that point we were like, we launched the product and the product was still the best product since day one because we put so much effort into it. So it was a really good product. We got our first couple customers. We were launching a new feature every single week. And the feedback from our early customers was. So they were. I was selling it back then. I'm still selling, but like, I was doing all the demos back then. So they were telling me that, I know you're new. I know some of the features that I want is not going to be on the platform, but at this pace, I know that you're going to outwork and outperform all the other competitors. So if you don't have something that I need today, you will have it two months from now. And I'm okay with that. They were telling me this, so it's. I didn't expect this to happen. It was just like, how can I be interesting on LinkedIn? So if you see new features, you would be interested in the post, I think. And then there was like the initial cycle.

Wait, wait, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Let's. This is really. This is really good. This is really good. There's so much value. This is like such an important playbook. And I relate to this so much. The. The thing you mentioned about one, one new feature a week, I love that because this is something that we did at Drift in the very early days. We came into the space, people were like, well, why? Nobody needs another marketing tool. There's so many. Isn't this just chat? There's already intercom, whatever. And so David and Elias, the founders over there, were like, the way that we're going to win and get attention this market is speed. What advantage do we have is speed? Like, we're. We had like 11 people on the team. We're going to ship something every single month and do a product launch every single month. And so it was like, at that stage of the company, you can be so iterative. And so they would literally be. We'd Close one customer. Talk to them. Okay. Oh, interesting. I want, we should build a slack integration next. And then we'd all meet and say, hey, Dave, you're in marketing. Then we want to launch a slack integration next. And so we. You build this drumbeat of like, new thing, new thing, new thing, new thing. Because I do think to your point, there's a lot of skeptics in the space and so they're like, well, why would I use this? You don't nearly have all the features. I think you almost need to like, lean into not having all the features. Get people to buy into your vision, show them that you're making progress every week. And it's the best, it's quite literally the best marketing you could have is like, new thing, new thing, new thing. It's like you can create your own momentum. And I love hearing about when the product, like product and engineering actually become the marketing. Like, that's the dream for me as a marketer. Like, when I went to drift, I was like, this is amazing. They got something new every two weeks, every month. I can announce, like, I'm going to be busy forever. There's plenty of stuff. And, and it's cool to hear you. You built that in. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention was people also ask about, like, where do I start? How do I get my first customers? And I think what you did is basically, I don't know why you wouldn't do this. Right. Usually you're not like, you started writing on LinkedIn six months before you were really selling the product. I don't know why people don't do this. I really don't. People say, like, how do you get your first customers? Like, do I just send cold emails on day one? Well, you could. Or you could do what Amir did, which is spend six months building ad air cover, building some awareness that when you have something to launch, you have an audience to launch to. You can't just wake up on day one and, and decide today's the day you're going to sell your product and start cold emailing people. And so I love, I love the combination of those things. And so where did you get your first customers from LinkedIn. How did you get, how did you get them? Because you've been posting for six months there. What was the content based on? It was based on the conversation that you're having with the people that you're trying to sell to. It's like the perfect combination of how to do early stage marketing.

Exactly. And then you need Feedback. So you want to talk to people if you're active on LinkedIn, even though if you're not like an influencer, people see your content over and over again. At some point, if you reach out, you have a very, very higher chance of getting a reply versus a cold email.

Yeah. And also everything posting on LinkedIn like you posting also is feedback. And so I'm sure there were times where like you wrote something and that post really struck a nerve and you're like, whoa, this really relates to something we're building. Like we should prioritize that because it's clear people want this.

Yeah, exactly. That happened. And that was like the initial wave. The next wave was I thought, how can I get this content in front of more people? Then I started our influencer program after our influencer program was like at a stage where I could leave it on its own. But we hired Obet as our head of content. Obet Durani Obet took my initial idea of the flow, which was, which is still our kind of like the media engine. One landing page, Netflix style shows and podcasts and things like that. I had that from the beginning. My thought was like, no one was talking about media engines or Netflix style podcasts or anything like that. My thought with my co founder was we are posting all this stuff on LinkedIn every single day, twice a day. If I wanted to see one of my posts that was interesting, I would go to my page and I scroll down all the way to find the post again. Or like find the video. Rather than that. What if we put all the best content on a landing page plus our blog post and other content. We built it ourselves. And then when I hired the bed, I said, this is the draft, it's going well, but I need to scale this and I need to have more people. I had more ideas. Can you do this? And they said, yeah, I can scale the flow as like the B2B marketing Netflix. And then we did it. Relaunched a lot of shows, a lot of podcasts with different people, both our customers, influencers, partners, everyone. So that was the third wave and after that, the last wave that we are in right now is Hockey Stack Labs. Then right now we can dive deeper into Hockey Stack Labs and what we are doing right now. But my idea right now is having one big pillar and then creating different sub pillars around it. So that's what we are doing with Hockey Stack Labs and we will continue doing it. And then in between also we raised two rounds. We groove a lot. So now we also have the budget to Run ads, partnerships, sponsoring events. We do all that stuff too.

So yeah, you've built up the inbound and media side and now like most companies in this space, you'll feel the pull to sell to bigger customers and move up market more. And that means you're going to have to do more of that events advertising field marketing stuff versus the inbound funnel. Let's talk about, let's talk about that media engine for a second. Let's talk about the flow. Is that in replace of like a blog? Do you have a blog where you write maybe like product updates? Like where do you see it? Where do you see it fit in the, in the funnel for, for Hockey Stack? How does it and how does it, how do you decide what goes there? How does it help you get customers? How do you measure it? Those are the things people wanted want to know. Like I think, I think you go to it hockeystack.com the flow, people look at it, it looks great, the content is great. That part's a no brainer. I think the part that people don't often understand or I want to talk through with you is like, but how does this turn into business? How do you drive traffic from it? How do you measure it? I'm interested in that.

Yeah. So we have a couple categories there. So we have product updates, we have like entertainment shows, we have education shows, we have shows about paid ads, how to run LinkedIn ads, how to do SEO, things like that. We have all that stuff. So like Aki Stack is analyzing user journeys and what I see from our user journey slash customer journeys is imagine you go on LinkedIn or search on Google, attend one of our events, go to our dinners and you're working at an enterprise as a CMO or like VP marketing. You see us all over the place. You know the basics. Akisaki is doing attribution analytics for B2B companies, spec by vice, General catalyst, all that stuff. These are the customers. I need the solution. I have a few others that I'm evaluating. I want to learn more about Hockey Stack. So now this is like this phase where you think about can I trust these people? Who are they working with? Who also trusts Hockey Stack? So when you go into our website, there are a couple places we can go to our customers page, see case studies. Everyone has case studies. It's not special, but yeah, we check one box, you go to our interactive demo. Okay, the product works. This is how I use the product. Everyone has some sort of that too. You got our platform pages, pages, product pages, use cases Everyone has those as well. But the flow, when you go into flow, you see the faces that you see on LinkedIn, these are the people that you follow. You see me as a CRO doing a show, showing our product.

I see, I know Jason, I know. Who else do I see that I know? I see Pep, I see, I see Todd. I see two people that I don't know their names, but I see them all the time. Yeah, this is cool.

Yeah. So now you trust us a little bit more and then that helps us in the conversations. So they say, hey, I checked out the flow last night. It was really good. I said this is people that I follow and I love them. I'm like, yeah, we have like partners, they're creating content with us. And it's just an easier conversation because any platform, like any seller on sales calls, no one trusts sales calls and salespeople. Anything that would help the salespeople in that conversation, whether it's partners, whether it's content, there's anything A, they can send in the follow ups, B, they can mention on sales goals that will help. And what I see is Obed and I, we always call this the rabbit hole. People go to our website in the sales conversation. So it's like stage two. We are in the second call stage. They go to our website, they spend hours on the flow, just like watching stuff and that hours really help the sales calls and sales conversations. That's like when they got into Pipeline. That also drives a lot of brand awareness. That's for the top of the funnel. So top of the funnel and middle of the funnel is really helpful.

A lot of people would have gated all of this. Yeah, I can just click through right now and watch anything.

Yeah, I mean one part is Hockey Stack helps us a lot with tracking so we don't have to gain. But also, I mean, I don't know, I wouldn't put my email address to watch videos. So it doesn't make sense to me.

So you're so, but you can so. So it scratches two itches. Number one, you can use your, you're using your own product to measure engagement, but you're not just basically you're not giving away all this content for free. You are able to. This is more of a newer way of doing marketing. You're measuring the engagement here in some way. And then you're gonna know if I, if I watch two videos and then three weeks later I go to the Hockey Stack site and I request a demo or I do something there, you're gonna, you're gonna be able to match those things, right?

Exactly. So how have we measured? We use it in the funnels. So we have a funnel step engagement to a certain degree. We use it in funnels, we use it in attribution reports. We also use it in our lift reports. So we are comparing. If you watch, if you spend, I don't know, five minutes and more on the flow, are you more likely to submit a contact sales form? We are measuring all that stuff. But also, as you said, if you're in our pipeline, we already know your email. So if you go to the flow, we can easily see that you're Dave because you submitted a form. If you're not in that pipeline, we can then see once you come back and we will also be talking to you in the process.

I love that I'm obviously, I've been out of the game as a, I'm doing a different business now building a media company. I'm out of the game as a, as a CMO and head of marketing. But this feels like, this is like the approach that I've always thought about and wanted to take with content, where I think oftentimes with B2B marketing teams, we, we're forced to measure content as like this direct response channel when it should be more about. And I know some people don't like this, but it's like the, it has influence on how somebody buys. And so like, maybe so someone ends up, you know, Amir ends up booking a sales call. But over the course of weeks, I know that he is on our email list and I know that he listens to the podcast and I know that he's watched three videos and I know that he's done these three things on our site. Like, that's how I would want to measure content. Like, are people using our content and engaging with it? Not necessarily. Like, especially in B2B, people aren't going to read a blog post and then buy your product. And so that whole way of measuring content just feels completely busted. I just think it's been traditionally hard to, hard to measure and hard to prove that versus like, yeah, this is how people can like, hey, marketing owns the website. Marketing owns all the content. Like, let me, let me get some credit for, for all of these assets that people are consuming and engaging with before they talk to us. And I'm sure you feel it on your sales calls. People feel like they already, they already know you and trust you and then like, okay, look, I like your stuff. Now tell me about the product.

Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what happens. And also to your point, our approach to attribution from the beginning has been it's not like you're trying to get credit from sales way to marketing. You're helping sales to get more conversations. And along the way you need to learn what is helping sales, what is helping you drive more conversions on the website on different platforms. Not like we are directly influencing x million dollars. No one is going to believe that. But if you can show the journey, if you can tell a better story with different reports, if you can use with reports, attribution models, customer journeys to tell a better story. In the process you will also learn what's working, what's not working so that you can drive more pipeline.

That's that, that's the dream is like when sales, when marketing is seen as an enabler for sale. Like we're going to enable sales. Like this is like we're going to grease the skid is like WD40. It's like you know, to, to, to make the whole process easier. But where this breaks down is when like those two teams have competing goals. Obviously you're the, you're the CRO, you own revenue at the company. So you see sales and marketing together as one piece and they each have different roles. I think that's just an interesting perspective and I think more people are going to start to think about content that way. How do you see the, this media engine scaling now? Like it seems like to date you've been able to, you know, ask for content from people. I don't know if you've, you've paid people for content. So tell me, tell me if that's, that's true or not. But like how do you see this scaling? How do you, how do you want to continue to invest in it? What do you think the future of it looks like and how do you keep getting content for this thing?

Yeah, I think the feature of the flow in our kind of like the media business side is going to be those pillars that I mentioned. For example, Aki Stack Apps is putting out a report every single week. It's a long report. How can we make sub pillars around it? So how can we make one podcast out of it? How can we make one live show from it? How can we do maybe like a quarterly Hockey Stack Labs event where we in person in the Bay Area or like New York, whatever we announced we release the report in person. So like creating those pillars around it and then hosting everything on the flow so that we have one single page where you can see Everything about Hockey Stack, I think that's going to be the way to scale it. And then the other thing is, so far we haven't used this, but I think the flow is a great, great way to support our POV with relevant people from the industry. So we see the feature like this. Do you see the same feature? Yes. Let's create content together to build the feature of B2B marketing attribution together and then have the flow support that vision with relevant people from the industry. That's how I see it so far. It was more one of the.

So find, find people who have strong points of view about the future of marketing, measurement, attribution, driving revenue and become a hub for them to create where they can share their, share their voice from a content standpoint.

One of my dreams was when we first started to flow. I know if you can do it in the next quarter or even this year, but my dream has always been having a place where, for example, if you want to create a content, create content. If you want to create a show, but you don't have designers, but you have a great idea, let us send you a camera, a microphone, you record the content, we edit it, launch your show on the flow. That has been my goal. I don't know if you're going to be able to do it this year, but at some point we're going to do that for the short term for Hockey Stack, it's going to be supporting our pov, building those relationships with the key people and then three, having those sub pillars around our main pillars.

And then the third pillar was Hockey Stack Labs, which I think is interesting to me because I think the world like you're doing two interesting things. You have this like media, media content hub, which I think that one is, that one will be harder to support just because it takes, it takes money and time. I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm not doubting that you'll do it. I've just, I've been there, I've tried to do it too, where the thing that I think is the most scalable and can produce the most demand right now is the hockey. Is the, is the Hockey Stack content concept. Because I think you have the, you have the right product, you have lots of data and that's just a great ingredient for marketing. And so instead of like cranking out five blog posts a week, why not do what you're doing, which is let's, let's do a bunch of research. I also think that helps people filter signal from noise if you don't publish often, but when you publish it's like meaty, it's data driven, there's lots of insights in there, it's well designed, it's a report. GONG did this with their GONG labs. I think you're taking a similar approach with Hockey Stack Labs. I love this idea of like a pillar piece of content every month, especially with a smaller team. Like do that, go deep on one killer topic, do research, do original content versus just like cranking out content. Is that, is that kind of how you got to this point with, with Hockey Stack Labs?

Yeah. So the initial idea was so every like quarter or so I think about what's going to be the be the thing for marketing this quarter and one quarter ago, like one and a half quarters ago I've been thinking about this and like what's the next step for Hockey Stack? What's the next step for Hockey St Revenue was the next big thing for Hockey Stack's marketing. And at the same time we started getting our first giant customers. These like multi billion dollar brands signing on with Hockey Stack becoming customers. And one thing that I've been thinking about a lot is how can we build trust at scale with these brands and overall in the market? How can we be the source for data and also answers. And then I've been talking with our head of growth, John Barrack, Hoover's VP at Cognizant and he was always mentioning that whenever he gets a question from the cmo, kind of like is our CPC on Google is like a good benchmark for an industry? For example, if you have $10, what's the industry benchmark? And there's nothing about that nor like this quarter was bad. Is it bad for everyone or is it just us? Are we failing or is like a downturn for everyone this quarter? Is January bad for MQR or is it not? So he was getting these questions from the CMO and others company and he wasn't able to answer it. And then I thought we have these answers from our database, we can help all the marketers have some sort of a benchmark for their questions. And also this is going to help us in a long term become the source. When you have a question you go to Hockey Stack Labs and then find the answer to your question. And over time it's going to build trust at scale with Large prints operators, CMOs. Then what happened was this happened really quickly. So we launched about 12 reports and what we see is CMOS send these reports to their team to help them with their day to day, they send it to their CMO group to help everyone with the benchmarks and everyone in the industry that wants to learn, they read the report and they send it and they want to use it in their day to day lives which was our goal. And then every time we push out a report at least 10,000 people read it in the first week, which has been insane. So main goal was building trust at scale and become the source for any type of questions in B2B revenue space.

10. You said 10,000 people read it each week.

Yeah, in the first week they read it and then after that we do like retargeting. We launch them as separate LinkedIn ads. Sometimes we sponsor my posts or like my co founders post or head of growth post or anyone the marketing and anyone that's posting so it's increasing. But once you post it. Yeah.

So you're driving people back to the. That's how many people have viewed the report and you basically launch the report and then drive a. Just keep driving people back to that report to for distribution.

Also something interesting that happened. I think I watched one video a couple of weeks ago from Gong. I think the same thing happened to them as well. People get really aggressive with the report, say no, it is not true.

I was going to ask you about that actually. I think it's because you have strong opinions and attribution is such a hot topic. Like every report, every report that you guys put out does stir up like some type of controversy in some way which I actually think is helpful for views of your.

Exactly. We didn't do it on purpose. So every time right now made me post about it. At least 5, 6 people post about it in the same day. They say this is not true and then we get more views. I think it's helpful.

The best thing that could happen, the best thing that can happen is if Chris Walker hates something that you wrote and comments about it and disagrees with you, it's just going to blow it up. So it's great. Do it every time.

Yeah, we are in a good spot. I'm sure he hates all of them. But yeah, other than Chris Walker, a lot of people, sometimes they hate it, sometimes they find useful, but at least there's some sort of conversation around it which is pretty healthy in my opinion.

Yeah, I think, well, I think I feel like I see a lot of questions in the like from Exit 5 like people marketers want benchmarks. They. They want data, they want benchmarks because it's easy to feel like you're flying blind. And so if you can content that's helpful, that helps me figure out like where I should spend, what I should do, how I should measure it, which channels are working or not like that, that stuff is always, I think what the, the, the, the industry that you're, the, the area that you're going after is perfect for content marketing to be like the channel for, for the business. I think you know companies that, it's just like you as a marketer or somebody that wants to drive revenue, you just kind of always are looking at what ingredients do I have at this company? Like can good content be really strong here? Maybe this or whatever. And I think the conversation about attribution, the fact that it's been a long standing issue with marketers, the fact that you have strong opinions on about it, it's like you have that perfect storm of ingredients to create content around it. And I like the idea of like once a month we're going to do original research and write a report about it. I think it's just a great example of startup marketing that, that people can try to emulate.

Exactly. But even like people want benchmarks. And then now the conversation. I don't know if you've ever seen the recent post about it. Now the conversation is hockey. Stack is doing more harm than good. Peak marketers are seeing the benchmarks and trying to do, trying to get to the same benchmark without any context. So there's always a conversation. No matter what we do, there's always a conversation. And I'm really, really okay with it. I love it, I embrace it. But we're not polarizing people on purpose. If we do that, I think we will have more, even more conversations around it. But we're not doing it on purpose. Just trying to help people help us. It's more brand awareness and also help marketers have some sort of benchmark to lean on.

Yeah, but, but you're, you're publishing what you what you're publishing something that you believe in. You're not, you're not intent, you're not misleading people. You're saying this is our data. Here's what it is. People say to me sometimes they'll say you. And I'm like, I'm, I'm sharing like what I've learned in marketing. Like I'll share like a copywriting tip. And people be like, you should, you shouldn't say you, you have a large following on here. You have a responsibility. And I don't. No, I don't. You don't. You don't you have to, you, you have to be responsible for what you read and what you decide to implement or not. And so read this report from Hockey Stack and you decide with your own brain. Should I, like, does this make sense? Is there something that I can, I can learn from this report? Like, I think that's, that's on you. Your job is to create interesting content and people have to use their own judgment to decide are they going to put it into play. Also, anybody who's actually done marketing knows that like all of this is, there's so much nuance in all of this. Everything is about experimentation and understanding what works you. And the rest is like, okay, I'm going to see what they did, I'm going to take a sprinkle of that. I see what they did, I'm going to take a sprinkle of that. I've tried it this way. It doesn't work for us and you got to learn it on your own anyway.

Also, there's a lot of context in the report. So we'd say the sample sizes and 150 companies in PDB SaaS with these ACVs and these regions and this is their sales cycle length. This is how we did research. These are our metrics. You have context. But if you say like okay, $10 in CPC, we need to get $10 in CPC in two quarters without any context. Maybe you have 15 months of sales cycle and the research is on three month sales cycles, but you want to get to $10 CPC because the report says that that's not my responsibility. My responsibility is having the sample size and how we do the research on the report so that everyone knows it. But otherwise it's not my responsibility. As you said too. And the next thing I think it's going to enable us to do is from day one our goal was getting into marketing attribution because there's a gap in the space and then moving from marketing using the data that we have into other things like abm, sales intelligence and customer success. Having one core platform and sub platforms around it, Hockey Stack tabs really, really impoverished those too. Because if you want to go into abm, which we did a couple of weeks ago, or sales intelligence, we have the necessary data to A make good product decisions and B support our POE with the labs reports. So for example, we look at our data, we decide on a product idea and then we build the product and then we go back to our research and say, hey customers, this is what we saw in the labs reports. This is what we saw on our data and have we built this product? Because you need this say much better POV to have backed by data rather than just going out talking to people, which you need to do, but you need to also support it with data and then build the product.

Do you think the name Hockey Stack has been instrumental in your, in your growth and brand awareness?

Why? Why do you think so?

It's memorable. Like it's memorable. It's simple. It sounds like Hockey Stick, but it's not. And Hockey Stack and, and for a while you all had. I don't know if you still have or not, but like you had that Hockey Stick emoji. It just. Which I think I've, I'm looking at your website now and it's like it seems like you're, you're. The brand is growing up a little bit, which I think is great. We're doing a similar thing with Exit 5 right now. But I think I feel like if your company was like cgt, CGT Labs, like new researcher. I think there's something to the naming of the company and I'm just wondering if that was like intentional from the beginning. Did you pick a name like, like I don't know if you've any, if you've ever spent any time with Pep from, from Winter, but he talked, he talks about how like he intentionally, he knew he was going to create this company. He intentionally went and created a memorable name. I did something similar with Exit 5. He was like, I want to find a word. I want to find a domain that's available. I want to find a name that's easy to say and, and common and familiar. And it seems like you have that with Hockey Stack. I want to. Wanted to know the backstory.

I never thought about this way. I actually thought the exact opposite. Sometimes people don't understand, especially like CFOs don't understand the name and I don't know if it's doing any good there, but.

Yeah, what do they want? The cfo? What do they. They only want to know if it's a, if It's a big five, big three, whatever is it price, you know, PwC? What does a CFO know anyway?

Yeah, yeah. And also like older companies, more like bigger enterprises sometimes they always ask what is the name that. What's the meaning? Doesn't make any sense, things like that. But they still buy. So I don't think it's doing any harm there.

I would just tell them it's like pick a language and say it's a translation for Generating revenue. In Icelandic or something French, it means.

Yeah. Pep is actually my. One of my advisors. We're really close. We never talk about this, but yeah, he's awesome. The name is coming from Hockey Stick chart, like this graph. Hockeystick.com is a hockey company, as you might have guessed. So we went with Hockey Stack. And I think, yeah, I love the name. It's great. People love it. I think. Yeah. As you also said, if it was PwC Labs, it wouldn't have the same effect of like, the flow by PwC. Yeah, it would be bad.

Just a small detail. But I think these things matter. And if you're starting a company or if you have the ability to influence those things, I think, you know, I don't think you need to spend all this money and like to do brand development if you know that's also not what you did. But I think it's like a little bit of creativity and stacking the deck in your favor for getting attention. A name like Hockey Stack, I do. I do think that makes a difference.

What does X5 mean?

So it was originally. It was originally DGMG, which is. Which was Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group, which is terrible. And my wife gives me a hard time because she's like, every time you name something, you pick the most damn, like, literal name. Dave Gerhart Marketing Group. And so I've become good friends with my accountant and him. Every time I would see him, he knows my business and my financials better than anybody. Every time I'd see him, he'd be like, how's. How's GDMD doing? Like, he'd. He'd mess up the letters every time. And I was like, this guy doesn't know the freaking name of my business. Okay, That's. That's one thing. And then I wanted to. I eventually realized there could be a company here, and I wanted to, like, remove myself as the center of it because I think that it could be a more, you know, I think it build more equity and it could be more of a exciting asset for somebody to one day buy if it wasn't like the Dave Gerhardt show. So I just literally made up a name. I wanted to make up a name. And this guy Harry Dry, who you know him from, he creates marketing marketingexamples.com. he messaged me and I was like, ask him about it. And he's like, you. Well, here's a quick little naming tip. You can name things literal or lateral. And so literal was like, Dave Gerhardt Marketing Group. Or like, if you were the marketing attribution platform or lateral. And the lateral example is like, you could just make up a story. Like, try to come up with a story about the thing you're creating. And so I was like, oh, okay. I was trying to think of places, and I was thinking of places. Oh, places. Exit five. So, okay, here's a story. So Exit five is the exit off of a highway that my wife and I would go to in the woods to escape and get off the grid when I was working. And it would always be when I was. When I was up at exit 5, which is this place in Vermont, that's when I would get like, unstuck on some idea or I'd get some new creative idea. I'd get clarity on something. And I was like, oh, there could be something there. And like, like the community and the content we're building, it's a place you go to get ideas and inspiration. Like, let's. Let's call it Exit 5. And I had a bunch of different name ideas, but I went to GoDaddy. I typed in exit5.com. It was available for like, you know, $300. And I bought it and just picked it. It's a good story now, but I also think, like, I think I could have named it 50 different things. I think you also just have to, like, pick one and go. And so many people just, like, let. They sit around and like, wait for the perfect name. And now, like, just like with Hockey Stack, the brand is one what. What it becomes and what you make it. And so now everybody's like, oh, yeah, Exit five. But I, I think you, you need to just like, pick a direction and go and build a story around it. Like, as you're doing, as we're doing with Exit 5. And. And that's, you know, that's often. I always talk to founders. That's kind of how it happens. When I first joined Drift, they had initially named the company Drift with two T's. It was D R I F T T. And it was a nightmare from a discoverability standpoint. Like, everybody, they didn't know. They wouldn't. They would email us. And they didn't know if it was two Fs and two Ts like, or they two D, R I I F T. It was a nightmare. And so eventually they had raised a little bit money and they were able to get the domain drift.com and then we switched everything, which is very nice.

I always thought it was like nine to five reference. Exiting nine to five.

No, no, I can't that's what I've done. I haven't. Well, I guess I'm now building a business. So I haven't. But. But no, I can't do that because if everybody quit their jobs, then I would. There would be no community for exit. There would be nothing. We need. We need people to work. We need people to work in marketing jobs. Don't. That was when I had the narrative of being a solopreneur. Now I don't. No exit. Let's. Let's keep nine to fives.

Skip to nine to fives. All right. Let's.

Let's wrap up. Let's wrap up and spend just a couple minutes on attribution. This is actually not a topic that I'm very strong at or skilled at. I'm good at getting people to pay attention to things and then hopefully we figure it out with attribution later. What is the high level point of view that you have with attribution? What's broken about it? Why start a company in this space? Just not necessarily to pitch hockey Stack, but just to give people a perspective about what do you want people to think about and how should they be rethinking attribution right now?

Yeah. So there are two reasons why people want to get a tool for attribution or anything in the space. 1. Show the value, prove ROI to get insights so that you can do better in the future. For one, showing roi. If you just screenshot something like a visible report, Salesforce campaign report, it's not going to make sense to the CEO or cfo. You need to be able to tell a story. And two, in order to understand the data, optimize things and get real value with insights, you need to be able to customize reports, build your own reports and just have specific and switch to your questions with the data. Using a reporting tool like Akisack RPOV is most of the platforms in the space, they have one static dashboard for every single customer. So everyone is using the same reports no matter how different the businesses are. And B they use the dashboards to just show the ROI that no one believes in. So then conversations start like marketing is influencing 50 million of value, but no one knows what that means. And then sales is also enforcing 15 million in value and then total error is also 15 million, but in total is 30 million. So no one understands that conversation. With Hockey Stack, what we do is you have complete flexibility. We also have dashboard templates based on industry that you're in. You can also customize reports, build new reports to answer your questions with a very simple ui. With that we also have buyer journeys. There you can go into specific accounts, see what's working, what's not working from the very first impression all the way to close one with offline online marketing sales touch points and then with attribution models, incrementality marketing mix modeling everything that you can have with one platform you get insights and optimize revenue. And then recently what we did was okay, we have all this data. When you think of ABM or like sales intelligence, all of these touch points like signal based upon is a hot topic right now, which is our latest product. All of those signals are actually the signals that we collect for attribution purposes. Now we are enabling salespeople like SCRs and AES to have those signals and then customize your outwitch for abm. We send all of these data as retargeting layers to display platforms LinkedIn so that they can use an ABM purposes. We have account lists, economist building, we have Salesforce BI direction syncs for abm. So one core platform to understand what's working, what's not working, what's diving pipeline with multiple different ways of measurement and then having two sub platforms for ABM and sales intelligence.

Do you help in the world of like a lot of we're seeing it. It's why Exit 5 is growing as a business. But a lot of companies now are doing more brand, what I would call brand based marketing. Not like brand campaigns but they're doing, you know, LinkedIn organic community building, podcasts, content. Those channels are amazing for marketing, but they're not very good for attribution because it's a little bit harder to understand. Like marketers want those things to be direct response channels and they're not. Is that a space that you that that you play in or help help people understand?

Yeah. So LinkedIn Organic, how we do it ourselves is one, we get hockey stack gets self report attribution forms and then categorizes them. For example, if you say image LinkedIn post HockeyStack's LinkedIn that all comes up as LinkedIn Organic. So we can see it. That's one way. The other way we get sales call trackers from Gong. So for example, if you mention on sales call that I heard you from LinkedIn we get it in the attribution reports. Three, we can use marketing mix modeling for one of our customers. Activecampaign just did this. They put in LinkedIn organic impressions, video engagement and all relevant stats for marketing smalling. We get the results back. So there are a couple different ways. If you want to measure it in different ways, you can do it with Hockey Stack. Yes, totally. And for Slack, the same thing. Usually staff report attribution or sales conversations. One thing that I learned that in that the major, like most people say that it's not possible to track because they think that it's not a digital touchpoint, so it wouldn't show up in the buyer journey. So it's not trackable. But what I've learned and what I've seen from our customers and from Hockey Stack's own kind of funnel, if those touch points happen, for example, if I. We get a lot of demo requests from Exit 5 and all those people mention Exit 5 in the form or in the sales call, if there's a touch point like that, they always mention it somewhere. It's just, can Hockey Stack bring that to the attribution reports? And yes, we can. Even though there's not a digital footprint.

That would be like, yes, I think that's what's interesting about Gong. And there's like the dream future state, especially in B2B, where you have to have like a sales call would be like, if you could ask every single person that you have to talk to how they heard about you, track all that, input it all. Obviously there's a difference between what someone says and like, like the touch points along the way. But that, that opens up a whole other can of worms. Like, do we, do we care? Because like isn't ultimately the goal to get customers. Or is it to justify, you know, what you did on some channel? Anyway. All right, Amir, thank you for hanging out with us. This is great. Or do you want to say. Did you want to finish on something? I didn't want to cut you off.

Yeah, I just wanted to say the most dangerous thing is just saying attribution doesn't work because we have five people who heard about us from a Slack channel. So we're just going to. To remove everything, rely on Stack for attribution. Form or attribution doesn't work. We're just going to go with mmm for paid ads. It's just, that's not the way. It's just how can we help you with data so that you can tell a better story or get insights and just like drive more revenue. That's what we are aiming for and what every B2B marketing organization is aiming for.

So it's never going to be. So it's never going to be this perfect funnel. But how can we just best understand roughly what what's working, what's not, where to spend more time, people, et cetera.

And also, it's the same for sales teams as well. If sales close rates are low, they just don't go to a platform which says your sales close rates are low because of this reason. But B2B marketers are expecting that from an attribution platform. Whereas in the sales world you go to a CRM, you watch calls, you talk to your SDRs, AES to understand the problem. Same with B2B marketing attribution. You have data, you have the context, you have the people come up with a solution.

Cool. All right, Amir, good to hang out with you. Thank you for coming on the pod. Go to hockey. You can check out hockey stack hockeystack.com the flow that we talked about is hockeystack.com the flow? Or go to LinkedIn. Find Amir. You'll find him. Amir Amir at Lee on LinkedIn. Connect with him. Send him a message. Be like, I heard your point of view on the Exit 5 podcast. I totally agree. I disagree. Or the next time he publishes a Hockey Stacks Lab report, yell at him in the comments. Because that always works.

Please do. Thanks, Dave.