086. Building a Demand Gen Budget

All right, welcome back to another episode of Foundify's Demand Gen Studio. Um, as always, I'm Miranda Jenkins and I'm joined by Emilio Garcia. How's it going, Emilio?

Hey Miranda, how are you? As always, a pleasure.

Right here. So today we're discussing a question that almost every B2B marketing team has either asked or eventually has to answer, and that's how much should we be spending on demand generation and building, defining a demand generation budget? So Emilio is going to be joining me today to walk through how we approach building your demand gen budget. budget at Boundify, from setting your initial budget to deciding where to invest it and ultimately how to measure whether it's working. So to start us out, this might be a broad question, uh, we might go down some rabbit trails because of it, but—

For sure.

Uh, when a company asks, how much should we be spending on demand generation, how do you typically Approach it?

Yeah, the first thing that I gotta say is that it's super relevant right, right now because of the fact that we're getting to that point of the year where this question is in the mind of a lot of CMOs, heads of marketing, and definitely decision makers. So super, super timely. I'm gonna try to break it into 3 scenarios. Even if we dive into each of them at different depths, I think one scenario is the person that already been doing this or the team that's been already doing this for a little while, right?

Mm-hmm.

You have been doing some marketing or demand generation effort in the past, therefore you have a historical to compare to, and now you are wondering what changes are you gonna make to your budget? So that's one scenario. take some approaches. The second one is, the second one breaks down in 2, which is, this is the first time that we're doing something like this. Yeah. And when that's the case, usually you either have a great goal behind and you wanna work backwards on the investment.

Yeah.

Or you have a budget, and I will explain where that budget is coming from. And you want to know what is the best use of that money and what is a good expectation of what we can accomplish with it. So it's 3 scenarios, right? I have something, some historicals, and I want to do changes. I don't have anything, but either I have a very clear goal and I'm asking for the investment, or I have a specific amount in mind and I want to know what I can accomplish. And if that matches some expectations. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I think it might be helpful for our listeners to know kind of what you were just saying, your thoughts on how to approach determining the budget. At the end of the day, we know that the amount of spend you have, the amount you can spend is the amount you can spend. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on approaching determining that from a revenue or pipeline goal and kind of working backwards to the amount you need versus looking maybe at like the available audience that you have, keywords, search volume, all of that, and then determining the level of investment you need to tap into that.

Yeah, I love that comment that you're making about the budget that you have. That's the budget that you have. There's a reason for that. And I'm gonna deviate into anecdote that I have about budgets and, you know, like investment. I used to work many years ago for a company where the CEO, it's a manufacturing company, the CEO used to say something along the lines, the math has to work, right?

Yeah.

And for him it was, this is how much we sell and we wanna make a profit, so we cannot spend more than this. To have to have something to share. And so you can go hoops and loops, but at the end of the day, if you are a for-profit company, there's a ceiling how much you can spend, because if not, you start losing money.

Yeah.

So I love what you're saying because yes, even if someone doesn't tell you the budget, right? And I'm saying in this case, it can be when you're working with a provider or a vendor like us, but it can also be internal, right? You have a boss and he's asking you to think about creatively of what can be accomplished. And he says, or she says something along the lines of, if it's profitable, we can invest whatever amount. Well, that's not true. That's not true because at the end of the day, usually this kind of expense can be, has to be justified from a revenue perspective, either current or reasonable expectations about it. Even investment happens in that way, right? It's a proportion of the revenue of the company. At the end of the day. And so in my mind, from the many different ways that I've read about this, most companies, unless they're like all growth VC-backed kind of startups, will invest around 15% of their gross margin in sales and marketing.

Mm-hmm.

Not in marketing, in sales and marketing. Because usually You lump them together from a financial point of view. So that's the ceiling. And therefore, usually the kind of like the question that bumps around for me is, are you doing some investments on sales already? Because if you are, then that, that's a great reference of how much can you increase spending on marketing activities that increase the chances of being chosen and therefore having something for the sales team to bring into the table and/or shorten their cycle. So one great question is around that, right? Using the revenue as a benchmark for marketing spending. And so if you added up all that, ends up being something around 5% of revenue, 5% of revenue or yearly revenue at most. Mm-hmm.

Now, Mm-hmm.

You can think creatively about it saying, well, this is a year where we are actually investing in it a lot because we know that we have been investing in this in the past and, you know, has got us to a certain level of growth. We want to change that trajectory, so we are increasing the spending itself. But I would always be mindful of tying it to current revenue, not just to expected return. Which is the formula that sometimes someone says, right? Well, if I invest a dollar and I can bring 5 in revenue, well, that's an excellent return on investment. In theory, there's no limit to the amount that you can put into marketing, but that's not true again, right? Because—

Yeah.

It's not going to happen right away. There's no 100% guarantee that it will happen. And so you're actually going to spend current dollars chasing those future $5 that are, you know, not as secure. Tying it to percentage of revenue is a great way to start if you have a budget in mind.

I think too, like, just thinking about our experience, you know, working with so many different clients, first of all, it's like very normal for People to approach the conversation from either of those areas, either saying, this is what I can spend on advertising, you tell me where it should be allocated towards, versus approaching it more like, based on the availability, you tell me how much I should be spending. And maybe it's a Maybe it's a stereotype or a generalization, but I feel it's my like instincts, but it feels more like the companies that are maybe testing out advertising approach it more of the like, well, you tell me based on what I'm trying to do, you tell me how much I should be spending. And the companies that approach it more like, this is what I have allocated towards marketing and advertising are the ones that it's more of a long-term part of their strategy that they're going to be doing marketing and, you know, they're going to be doing advertising. Would you— any thoughts on that?

No, I completely agree. It is a little what we were saying about you already have a budget in the past, and so you have some data to back up the potential impact. And you're testing around the edges of what you've done, right? It's a new channel, it's a new format. You are testing how it will scale, right?

Yeah.

If I add an extra dollar, what is the marginal increment of the results that I've been getting? And so you are more clear on how much you are willing to put out there to try because your expectation of the outcome is Based on the reality that you already have versus when you have never done it before, this big risk of not working forces you to ask the question, this is what I wanna accomplish, how much do I need to invest? Mm-hmm. And so, yeah, I agree with you. And again, more often than not, I think solving for, I have a budget and now let us estimate what can be done, is a way better approach. than I have this goal, tell me how much it's going to cost, because usually that relies a ton on having a great set of data specifically for the channel that you're going to try. But if you have never done it, you are running on a ton of assumptions, on tons of assumptions. And so it's a very flimsy foundation.

Yeah. Another distinction that I want to recognize, you know, here in the beginning is that we definitely Realize that your demand gen budget as a whole is bigger than ad spend and has to encompass more than just ad spend. So paid media is only one component of your full demand gen budget. It's also accounting for your tech stack, any money going towards content and creatives, maybe any money going towards landing page creation. And then strategy and campaign management, especially if that's coming from an outside source like an agency. That's definitely something we run into where it doesn't always make sense for a company if the cost of launching and running and potentially bringing in an outside agency like us eats into what you can actually spend on paid media and on advertising. Um, you're— you can run into where you're spending more to run the program than you are on, you know, the campaigns themselves. Um, so do you have any input into like what all things you should be considering and taking into account when you're determining your budget of where that money is going to be going towards?

Yes. Again, thinking when you are not thinking a lot of unit economics, but rather, you know, as a percentage of revenue, then it's easier to just take a percentage of revenue, consider that your budget for sales and marketing. Usually you already have some fixed costs already, right? Mm-hmm. Like saying, I already have a sales team, I already have some technology, I'm already investing in some maybe content creation. And then it shrinks heavily what you can do, accomplish, you can accomplish with paid media and that ad spend budget. The only thing left is to estimate depending on the platform that you're going to pick. And we're going to talk about what differences that those choices do. Cost per impression, cost per click, potentially cost per conversion and things like that. Now, when you are taking more of the approach of, I understand very well my, the value of my customers, the value of a deal, the value of a transaction when I close it, I have great data about it and great volume, then you can run this other scenario that is used especially in SaaS, which is comparing that long-term value of the client or transactions against the cost of bringing that transaction to market or to the company, the cost of acquisition. So it is a little bit of what you're saying right now. That cost of acquisition is not only ad spend. That's why you sometimes you will hear something like, well, you need to have a ROAS of 5, 10x. And the reason is because only those levels of return on ad spend will allow you to have enough room to add all the things that you're saying as well that shouldn't be ignored. Right. The, not only the ad spend, maybe the outsourced help, outsourced help, in-house help for creatives and landing pages. And obviously the cost of actually the sales team closing this, if this is not a product-led kind of effort, right? If people is buying on the website, then it's gonna be way less. But for most of our clients that are B2B, so a human is gonna be on the loop and there's a salary to pay there. So only having a ROAS of that level will allow you to put all that, and maybe your cost of acquisition is equivalent to 1 year of the value of the client at most. But I, I know plenty of examples of companies that are in that growth mode where they're really going after market share, growing as fast as they can because they want to pretty much win the race. Against other companies in the same category. And in those cases, I wanna say that the ROI is negative because the way that they measure it is how long does it take to pay back, right? So the payback period of those efforts usually is way more than 3 months or 6 months or 9 months of revenue, can be sometimes 18 months. And again, that's the choice, um, that you can make when you have that budget to, to support it, usually coming from investment rather than from revenue So those are like the two scenarios or places where you want to make those calculations. Do I don't have great information about the economics of my transactions, right? Per deal lifetime value. I don't have great information about how much time, effort, and technology is invested in each deal to make those calculations. Then It's better to use the approach of the percentage of revenue. Take away everything that you're investing, you're left with something, and you go and see how much it costs to get the impressions and clicks and get information about what will be the lift that you will see on the metrics that you have right now. You have great economics, then you turn it on the head and say, well, you start with the cost of acquisition maximum that you're willing to afford, or— The longest pay— longest payback period that you're willing to wait until you get the investment back. And then you do the calculation for Aspen and everything else. And that gives you, this is the most that I'm willing to pay for, let's say, clicks or impressions and like fixes the mediums where you will show up. Mm-hmm. Or even in some cases, I was just having a conversation with a prospect about it. Sometimes the, the conclusion is this paid media channel or paid media in general doesn't work for us because our contract value is too low to support it, right? So you gotta use something else. So that's a very sophisticated version of using the budget in that way. But those, those are the 2 ways that you can approach it.

Yeah. All right, so then getting into kind of where, how we recommend allocating budget within paid media. Yeah. We have lots of episodes out there about our thoughts on paid media, and I'll make sure to link some of the most relevant ones in the show notes, but we, We like to think about paid media in demand capture versus demand creation. So starting out with demand capture before you're expanding up funnel, you want to make sure that you're visible when the buyers are actively looking for your solution and prioritize, prioritize those high-intent channels. So that's paid search, Google Ads. now OpenAI ads even, and understand how much demand actually exists there. So can you talk us through the baseline starting point of determining how much spend you should be allocating towards demand capture platforms?

As you know, I love this part, right? It's about the availability and in-market, out-market. Precisely as you you know, Miranda, you're helping me out, helping me out with this. We're working on a presentation to talk about some of those marketing principles that I feel will stay true even with the changes that AI is bringing. Mm-hmm. And so, um, as I'm working through this presentation, I find something that is very interesting to present when we talked about building demand, capturing demand. It's a concept that is coming from this idea of physical and mental availability, which is, mm-hmm, more like the theoretical concept. But I like these phrases because they feel closer to what anyone that is not even familiar with marketing will understand very quickly, which is you want your brand or your company to be easy to mind. Mm-hmm. That comes easy to the mind of the buyer and easy to find. Or easy to buy, right? So that's basically the idea. So when you think about advertising, and it doesn't only apply to advertising, but we are focused obviously in paid media here, easy to find or to buy, that's what we mean by capturing demand, right? Mm-hmm. Imagine this person that is on the aisle of a supermarket. They are searching for or thinking about the solution that you offer, or maybe even thinking about you. And so you wanna put a lot of effort making sure that you're easy to find and easy to buy. And that's what demand capture efforts do, right?

Mm-hmm.

They ensure that someone that already has you, have you in your mind or in his mind, actually is able to find you and buy from you. Because if not, you lose the opportunity. That person walks through the aisle, doesn't find your brand, and just picks something else that is available, right? So you don't wanna be in that situation. The big allure of investing paid media on capturing demand though, is that it's way easier to prove that it works. And from the presentation, we will talk about this as well. It is the equivalent of having an offer where you offer a coupon to someone that is in front of the restaurant ready to be seated. It's gonna work. You're gonna have great attribution. And so it's very tempting to say, well, all my paid media efforts are going to be very close to the sale, very close to the bottom of the funnel. Mm-hmm. Because that's when I can see that actually I'm getting great return on investment. Those companies are going to have the greatest ROA. They're going to be the ones that will be the quickest to close, right? And so, but at the same time, they're the smallest bucket of opportunity because it's precisely because those people are at the bottom of the funnel. They're at the very bottom of the decision. So what we say usually to buyers is, probably you're investing too heavily on capturing demand, right? If not 100%, very close to it. So we are— we advocate for something like 50/50.

Mm-hmm.

Thinking in this way, you are investing for the short term, but also building for the long term on brand, building that demand for the future.

Hmm.

But we understand that probably Someone that is investing 100% of their current paid media efforts, or that is starting this for the first time and needs to prove to the executive team that this idea might have some impact, needs to start capturing demand, especially if there's a— if you're in a well-established category where there's a lot of buyers aware of what the industry that you are offers. So my recommendation, or the typical recommendation that we do, is if this is the first time, allocate a small percentage of that brand building. It can be measured, right? We, as you said, we have talked about this in other episodes, and start little by little, maybe every year or every, every quarter or every 6 months, shifting a little bit based on performance, moving a little bit to building more the long-term And strengthening that brand. So when the moment to buy comes, you get not only more buyers, but actually easier buyers, more buyers that are better aligned with your company rather than intent that is not a great fit.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And we have a whole episode on how to, how we recommend you break down the campaigns, you know, you have running on On paid search and everything, so I'll link that. But then for demand creation, where, like you said, most of your available market isn't actively looking for the solution, and so a lot of we want to make sure that some of your budget and some of your attention is going to that large portion of the market. And our typical breakdown for spend per campaign for demand creation is 40% for awareness, 30% for consideration, 30% for decision. I had to do the math in my head there to make sure I was coming out even.

You got it.

Yeah. So can you kind of walk through that breakdown and the thought behind 40, 30, 30.

Yes. I wanna say the other thing that is important on building demand, building awareness, is that it's more complex than capturing demand in some senses. And you can see it because when someone is showing intent, your messaging is all about, again, being easy to find, easy to buy, right? That you quickly offer reasons why someone should take action. So the messaging is all about taking action, all about removing friction, all about creating urgency, all about creating exclusivity so you don't miss the opportunity because that moment of intent can be flicker, flicker sometimes. Now for building demand, it's different because not just one message, you are trying to accomplish so many things at the same time. And again, I don't wanna create this, the idea that it's a funnel necessarily, necessarily. You can think of it as lanes or categories that you have to drive forward, right? And the strongest all of them are, the better, right?

Mm-hmm.

And the categories are, one big problem is being recognized, right? So, we are in a sea of advertisement and marketing and efforts to grab our attention. So, you need to be distinctive enough that you capture attention, but also consistent enough that when someone sees you again, it recognizes that it's the same brand because you wanna put that equity into the same abstraction, right?

Right.

Just like you do with a person or you do, in this case, you can do with a company. You wanna add up all that recognition into the same place. And in our heads is a little node, right? I've used that example where you keep adding stuff to that concept. And so you need to be, you need to be recognized and remembered. That's the known part. You need to reach all your potential buyers with a distinctive placement. That's your brand and your logo and your fonts and all that. And that's one big chunk of the thing that you gotta do, but it's not enough because there are many brands that are very easy to recognize, but that people don't have a lot of understanding of what is it that they actually do.

Hmm.

It's not as important in B2C. Sometimes we just pick something because we know the brand is familiar to us and we don't go in depth into what exactly they stand for or what they do or what is the product. But in B2B, it's more difficult to do just that, right? Most of those choices have longer-term impact, impact others within the organization. So you typically need to understand not just the brand, but what is it that they actually do? What makes them different? So that's a second job that you have to accomplish while you're building brand, not only to be known and remembered, but actually to be understood, right? What is it that you stand for? What is your positioning? And lastly, it's not enough, unfortunately, to be known and to be understood. There needs to be a level of trust because every time they're going to— someone is going to select a new brand, There's value for sure, right? There are jobs that you solve, pain points that you solve, but the question in someone's mind is, can I trust this organization or company? Just like you will ask from a person, right? You are claiming that you are this, you are showing up in the right places, you are showing up constantly, I've seen you, but if I'm going to engage with you, can I trust you? And that trust doesn't come only from the people that is claiming that. It has to come from others as well. And ideally those others have reputations of their own that they can risk or put on the line to promote you or claim that they know you. So because you have to accomplish all these things, which technically are 4, right? Be known. Mm-hmm. Be understood, be trusted, be remembered. Your build demand efforts or demand generation efforts have to be break down into those buckets. And that's where those percentages, Miriam, that you were talking about come from, right?

Mm-hmm.

The biggest problem is a lot of people don't know who you are or that you exist. That's awareness. You need them to invest a little time on understanding what is it that you do and what jobs do you do and what pain points you solve. That's consideration. And finally, on decision, you are building on trust and maybe some urgency as well, right? So pay media, or that is pay social, for example, that is very context-focused, can be used for capturing demand because you can make the assumption that some of the people that are spending time on those places might be in market. It's just that they haven't not yet go to the search engine, or they have done it and they're still thinking about it. So in that decision phase, you can at the same time build trust and be available, right? Mm-hmm. You can be easy to find because if someone says, well, I'm gonna take action, well, now I'm gonna take action from this ad that I have here in front of right now from LinkedIn instead of actually going to Google and search for the brand, right?

Mm-hmm.

So a little bit of that decision happens or that, you know, intent happen at the very bottom. But I will argue that most of the things that you can do on context is to leverage awareness and consideration as much as possible.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I think the first question that might come to mind is, does a company's maturity level play into that decision at all? Whether thinking through the 50/50 split between capture versus creation, and then the breakdown within demand creation. Would you approach that any differently for an established brand versus like a new company entering the market?

Yes, that's a fantastic question. The answer is yes. I'm gonna, I'm gonna think on 2 scenarios. One is for a company that is very well established already in terms of business, right? Yeah. Successful business with a pipeline already in place that is closing deals and you have established revenue. And so in, in a situation, a company like that, you can be in 2 situations. You might have a very successful business that has a very weak brand, or you might have a very strong brand, right, that can leverage sales activation to get more opportunities because you're well known. Okay. So, in either of those 2 cases, we're talking about a mature company. So, it's counterintuitive, but a company that has a great brand, right, that is, is top of mind, actually should invest more on sales activation, meaning more on capturing existing demand because their brand requires less maintenance. It's not that they shouldn't invest, but they don't need to, they don't need to build it up. They just need to keep it on top, right? Kind of fend the competitors. And they can have the luxury of actually capturing as many, as much demand as they can because they have a strong brand. Imagine that someone's looking for a smartphone and you show, well, Apple. Well, that's an easy sell, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's a very well-known brand. The other one is a little bit different because usually when you have built a strong company out of capturing intent, but not invested a lot in brand, you might be in this situation where you have already tapped all available intent channels with great offers, great urgency, great reducing friction, being easy to find, and your best investment is actually to build brand because that will remove the barriers of being chosen, right? The barriers of, well, maybe I don't trust you. It takes longer to buy from you. All of those barriers can be removed or reduced if you invest more in brand. So, Mm-hmm. that's a balance there that I will advise companies to consider, right? Strong brand, invest more on capturing demand. Weak brand, invest more, more on actually enhancing it so you can leverage intent that you're already capturing. Now, The other scenario is when you are just immature for paid media, even if you have the budget, right?

Mm-hmm.

And, um, and I think we actually should, or, or maybe we have done already an episode specifically on that, right? When, when do you engage an agency that focuses on paid media and therefore when you invest in paid media?

Mm-hmm.

And I will say that one mistake that I see is, for example, Unless you're a startup with VC money, is that you're the founder and you're testing the product out there. I'm not saying that you 100% of the time shouldn't invest in paid media, but the number one priority is actually making sure that your product or service fills a need in the marketplace, right? You gotta pick prospects and leads that actually are gonna validate the ability of the product or service to solve a problem. And the way that you validate that is through getting paid for it. So in that sense, paid media is not that it's wrong, it's just that it can amplify the ignorance, right? Mm-hmm. Because you don't have a funnel, you don't know if the product solves the problem, you don't know if whatever market you thought you wanna reach out to is actually the market that will buy from you the most or that will be happiest with your product. and will refer you business, which is the ultimate validation of what you're doing. So in that situation, I don't think paid media is a great start. The second situation is you have a founder that have established some great pipeline and now is bringing in, you know, a sales team or at least someone that is developing, you know, business development and doing some outreach.

Mm-hmm.

There, my marketing investment will be rather than in paid media, more on what might be called product marketing, which is now that we have some evidence that we are capable of helping some industries and some with some products at some price point, and we have some case studies reflecting all that in a place that is easy to find, usually the website, right? So you want to have a strong website present that actually reflects who do you help, why you can be trusted and all that. So that can be the material where people get educated and you start, you know, using that so your sales team can leverage that information and find more of those buyers. Only until, and I know this is a long digression, but only until you have those 2 situations that you have great product fit or market fit and you have established sales motion, it doesn't have to be with people, it can be something that happens ecommerce-like, but that you have a flow of it. Then you start saying, how can I amplify this? I'm getting this amount of inbound inquiries. Can I use paid media to actually go where people is searching for this and present myself? And can I go to the places where these potential buyers spend time digitally and present the problems we solve, who we are, and why we can be trusted? And then you amplify something that is already working. So that's a big, a big recommendation. Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't before. The only caveat is if you do it before, consider it a part of the market test. Consider it a part of market research. Consider it a part of validation. It will help you in a meaningful way. It will help you to learn faster.

Mm-hmm.

If you are after the right buyers and you have the right product, You have the right pricing, the right, well, business model, but do not expect from it product-market fit. That should come from actually testing the product itself or the service itself.

Awesome. Starting to wrap things up here. So say a company has, um, you know, launched everything exactly as we told them to have the, you know, Budget allocation nailed down, how often would you recommend that they revisit where their budget is allocated towards? And are there certain, like, signals that should tell— that tell you it's time to move the budget from one initiative to another?

Yeah, I love cadences, as you know, right? I'm a big believer in things like the way that EOS breaks down breaks down the how do you think on timeframes. So definitely the company itself has some very long-term goals, and most of what you are trying to do in marketing has a shorter window, but it's not too close. It's usually a year. Yeah. So the way that I think about it is hopefully your budget was prepared based on those Next year, 12 months business goals. So it has that vision of long-term effort. That doesn't mean that you're gonna check in 12 months and see what worked and what didn't. Usually you wanna break it down into smaller timeframes where you can validate if your thesis still holds. Mm-hmm. Whatever you thought your goals are and the reasons in the marketplace to do so, need to be validated in a shorter timeframe, I highly recommend 90 days, right? What I will say is start with your basic assumptions and your budget, run for 90 days with weekly checkups on making sure that the tactics are performing as expected, but stop at the 90-day mark and actually question the strategy again. Not in a— you're not questioning the goal, you're not questioning where you want to go, What you're questioning is the path that you follow so far, and if it's the one that is gonna actually get you there, and if you're making the progress that you expected to be done, to have by, by, by then. And if not, then you adjust. And if you are in the right path, you can try to stretch the goal and go farther. That's fantastic. Mm-hmm. But also, I wouldn't recommend that you, you know, try something 3, 3 weeks or 90 days and then scrap the strategy altogether, right? It's more of a check, it's alignment. And so that's a balance that I really like. Not so long as obviously 12 months or 6 months, but not so short that you are changing what you wanna do every week.

Yeah. With also being mindful of what the timeline per channel that's kind of like standard for B2B of when you can expect to see those signals because They're very different comparing Google Ads to LinkedIn per se. Yeah. Like, you know, the signals coming in at certain timeframes.

Yeah, I definitely recommend that, right? That from the beginning you establish, as you know, again, something that we draw from EOS quite frequently is 3 types of metrics, right? You want activity metrics. We want to measure that the work is being done because, and this is so important because when you are looking for explanations, you just want to exclude the fact that the work is being done. That's the whole reason. We don't want to say, well, it's not working, but it's not working because we didn't actually execute it on the— on what we propose. And so the reason you measure activity is to just make sure that that part gets out of the way and you can actually evaluate the strategy itself. But the second thing, uh, that is— the second thing that is important to evaluate is to having some leading indicators, what you calling properly signals, and I completely agree. Exactly. Because unfortunately, the outcomes, which is what you really want, will have a tremendous lag, right? Sometimes there's no clear paths to attribution, and you can only work with correlations. And so leading indicators will help you to see if the early correlations are working, you can have some expectation that the outcomes Also will get accomplished. Sometimes they don't. It happens sometimes. The greatest example that we're all of us living right now is the change in ranking and organic traffic with AI, right? It used to be that if you were ranking on the first places, you were getting traffic. And if you were getting traffic, you were getting leads. But that correlation now is broken because you can be ranking on the first place. And it's still not getting traffic, not getting that brand exposure, and not getting the outcome. So that happens from time to time, but it still is super helpful to have activity indicators, leading indicators, and obviously you want to track your outcomes. The only recommendation is that I will spend more time tracking very closely, meaning weekly, biweekly, or something like that, your activity and leading indicators, and being more patient. With your outcomes, right? That's something that you want to see more on 90-day cycles or things like that.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, Emilio, thanks as always for joining me and all of your insights. Thank you for listening to Demand Gen Studio. If you found this episode helpful, subscribe for more conversations about building and improving your B2B demand gen programs, and we will see you next time. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you for the invite.