Hunters’ Head of Demand Gen on Lead Generation Mistakes (Workshop Wednesday)

All right, great to see everyone. I'm just gonna give it another few seconds as people join. I know the beginning of the year is crazy, so thank you so much for making time for us. All right, welcome, welcome. All right, welcome everyone. We are thrilled to have you back at our first Workshop Wednesday of 2023. I hope you all had a restful 2022 and are geared up and ready to go. I know we are. We are going to be here every Wednesday at 10:00 AM, and we will share these detailed, interactive, and hands-on workshops. We have a great expert to kick us off today, and we are so excited to have her here. So we have Sarah. She is Head of Demand Generation and Field Marketing at Hunters. We will be discussing hiring a marketing team to do lead generation is a big mistake, and here is why. As a reminder, we want to keep these interactive. So if you have not already, turn on your camera. We would love to see you. Awesome. I can see Jason's, Caitlin's, everybody's on already. Thank you so much. And with that, I will introduce Sarah. Sarah, welcome.

Thanks, Caitlin. Good to see everyone today.

Good to see you too. So we are going to start off with a few questions just so everyone gets to know you. How would you define what you do at Hunter?

So I joined Hunter's, um, when it was a Series A startup. We were around 50 people. I was the first demand generation hire. Reporting directly to the CMO. And now I've built out a demand generation and field marketing team. So I have 3 people reporting to me and then I work very, very closely with the other areas of marketing, like product marketing, revenue operations. And what we do is essentially work with the sales team to create high-intent opportunities that then convert to revenue.

Great explanation. Okay, now diving into what project are you working on today you're most excited about?

It's a tough one. I think, um, currently in the last 48 hours I've been trying to remind myself what it's like to work at a startup after detaching for 2 weeks and kind of detoxing from a very busy year last year. And this year we're trying to move kind of beyond the $10 million revenue ARR mark. So it's really trying to scale the business from a demand gen perspective of going beyond tactics to really being strategic and trying to kind of bring the business to the next level.

I think a lot of us are in that position that we are definitely feeling the, effects of a 2-week break, so completely understand. Now for our hardball question, um, in the last 12 months, what is the hardest thing that you worked on?

I think the hardest thing was really just going from a business of 50 people to then 150 people within a year. Um, with Hunters, we had an extraordinary year in 2021 where we were able to grow revenue 5x, we were able to triple our headcount, and we were able to get 2 major rounds of funding. So I think going through that type of growth is something that has taught me a lot, and it's been probably one of the most challenging but rewarding experiences in my startup career so far. So I would say that, and we can kind of dive further into it with more context during the presentation.

I mean, definitely sounds difficult. So excited to see how you got there. If you want to go ahead and share your screen, I think we're ready to kick things off.

Alrighty. Hold on. Okay, I think we're good to go then. Once you can see—

yeah, we are ready to roll.

Okay, perfect. All right, let's jump in then. So I'm going to talk about, uh, this was the title of a, a LinkedIn post that I wrote in, I think it was the end of Q1 or beginning of Q2 last year. And it went viral. So it's a topic that I know is close to a lot of people's hearts, and it's also one that creates great debate in the world of sales and marketing. So a little bit about myself. I am a 3-time startup marketing leader, so I worked for 3 startups. The first one, I was kind of doing demand gen for the first time. The second startup, I was, you know, the first demand generation hire, and then, you know, growing out a team at a like 100+ person company. And then my current role with Hunters, I really started from what felt like grassroots. I think each time you work for a startup, you have this thirst to get in earlier and earlier so you can have more of an impact and build things from scratch. So maybe, who knows, next time I'll be even earlier, but At Hunters, uh, during the first year I worked there, the business grew its revenue from $850K, uh, to just under $5 million. So it was a phenomenal year to be part of the business. Um, and it's been a great experience to kind of learn, you know, that through the highs and lows, you know, every startup has to make decisions very, very quickly. Some of those decisions are good decisions, some are bad. And we'll talk about both of those during this session. So I will talk about why early stage startups stop growing. Should be very relevant to all of you. And then the difference between lead generation and demand generation. A lot of people use those terms interchangeably, but I will tell you why that is not the best idea. And then finally, we'll end on how to create a demand generation strategy for your business. So a little bit of context. We are here because we all love startups. Startups are fun, they're exciting, but they're very, very challenging. And part of why they're challenging is between every single revenue milestone, there is what's called a valley of death. So this is taken from a book called Scaling Up, and this is kind of the Cliff Notes of the book Scaling Up. If anyone's interested in getting the short version, I got this from Eric Olson through Medium, and it's one of the things that I reference constantly because anyone who's been part of a startup, if you've been part of a startup that's around the $1 million to $10 million mark, you know, it truly feels like you're, you know, crossing this valley of death where the leap to go from a $1 million ARR business to a $10 million ARR business is absolutely enormous. And it requires a huge amount of thought and careful consideration around your strategy, you know, excellent execution. And then we get to the next danger zone, which is you know, going beyond $10 million. So only in this, you know, subset of research that they did within 28 million firms in the United States, only 17,000 of the startups reached $50 million ARR. So, you know, if we were to ask around in the community, the number of people who have been part of startups, never mind the CEO of a startup that's gone from $10 million ARR to $50 million ARR, that subset of people is very, very small. And we can see here it's 0.06% of companies. And, you know, me as a marketing leader within startups, it's one of my personal goals to become part of this 0.06% club of being part of that journey from $10 million ARR to $50 million ARR. So why do some companies, and not just some, why do the majority of startups not make it to that, you know, through those valleys of death and going from one milestone to another? Why do companies stop growing? From my position within marketing and working very, very closely with sales, it's been clear the startups that I've worked with that have stopped growing rapidly beyond $10 million ARR. These companies are capturing, they're very good at capturing existing demand, but they're failing to create new demand, which is important because research shows that 95% of B2B buyers are not in market for your product at any given time. So if you're only capturing that 5%, and you're not focused on educating and nurturing the 95% that aren't in market to buy, you will exhaust your audience and there will come a time where your sales team is really struggling to bring in new customers. So what do you do when only 5% of your ICP is in market to buy at any given time? So I drew this out in terms of what I think it looks like, and you can see on the left-hand side the happy path is the people— or the happy path involves the people who are in market to buy. They're aware of your solution, they've either heard about you through the grapevine, they've seen your advertising, they've received a recommendation from a friend or a colleague, they're ready to buy, and then you pass to the sales team and then they do want to buy your solution. Everyone's happy, everyone celebrates. That's great. But the reality is most people aren't ready to buy. They're not in market right now. So many of the marketing teams out there working for startups, we're spending our time trying to retarget, educate, nurture those 95% so that You know, we're, we're gonna hit our number this quarter, but we're also focused on building that demand for future quarters so that the business can compound over time and hit those growth milestones. So this is a conversation that happens within probably every startup out there. The CEO is talking to the marketing leader and saying, we need more leads. You know, the numbers are getting bigger and bigger. Show me the leads. And then the CMO or marketing leader is saying, but low-intent leads rarely ever convert to revenue. So this brings up the question: lead generation versus demand generation. What is the difference? This is a breakdown of lead gen versus demand gen. In terms of mindset, lead generation is very short term. It's about hitting the, hitting the number right now. It's about showing immediate impact, but the conversion rates are very low. Like we said, 95% of your market is not ready to buy. So if you're focused on bringing in more and more leads, you're likely going to bring in more and more people who aren't ready to buy. Targeting often involves everyone within your ideal customer profile or your ICP. The approach is focused on volume. This is where we hear, you know, we need to do lots of dials, we need lots of lists, we need lots of, you know, cold outreach. That is a lead gen approach, and the KPIs tend to be how many leads are we bringing in, and then how many marketing qualified leads is usually how a marketing team is measured within a lead gen approach. On the other side, demand generation is about having a long-term view. You know, we're a successful business that plans on sticking around. So if you're not ready to buy from us now, we still want you to be a customer in the future. So we're going to treat you well, we're going to nurture you, educate you, and keep you engaged. We're not going to be very aggressive and turn you off. The conversion rate tends to be very high because demand generation focuses on attracting buyers who are in that 5% in market to buy. These are buyers with intent. They've got a strong intention. They've got a project. They've got budget. They've got a pain point and they're familiar with your brand. The approach is focused on delivering value. We care about giving value to customers, not just serving our own interests as a vendor wanting to hit their numbers. And then the KPIs for marketing teams that are focused on demand generation: pipeline and revenue. We don't care about leads. What we care about is that we have qualified pipeline to give to our sales team and that that pipeline is going to convert to revenue. So this might blow your mind, but it's a funnel taken from a company called Refine Labs. Their CEO and founder, Chris Walker, is very opinionated, you know, in a good way, about doing demand generation and doing marketing in a progressive way. And you can see here on the left, this is the funnel of a marketing team and a sales team that's focused on declared intent. So these are people in the funnel that are saying, they're raising their hand, they're saying, "I would like a demo," or, "I would like to contact you to talk about your product." So you can see the lead to close one, that's the CW, is 3.8%. You can see there were 2,000 or so leads and they ended up with 76 close one customers. So that's an example of a business that's following a demand generation approach versus on the right-hand side, you have a lead gen approach, which means we're all about leads. We want as many leads as possible to fill the top of funnel. So we got ebook leads in there. We've got people who have downloaded our guide. We have people who attended our events or we met at trade shows. We have 23,000 leads. And if you could imagine the sales team that has to sift through those 23,000 leads, that's a lot of leads and that's a lot of wasted time, I'm sure, because they've only closed one. Six customers. So that's a lead-to-close-one conversion rate of 0.02%. And of course, this might seem like an exaggeration, But I've actually been part of businesses who have taken this lead gen approach and it creates a huge amount of pain for sales teams, marketing teams, chief revenue officers, CEOs, because a lot of it is spinning their wheels with inflated numbers and a lot of disappointment, a lot of disappointment when you see the actual results at the end of it. So you may be wondering, What are the tactics that are involved with lead gen versus demand gen? Like, what does lead gen actually involve? It tends to involve buying email lists. So, you know, I've been part of every startup I've been part of, someone has raised their hand and said, why don't we just buy a list of our competitors' customers? And the reason is you're not supposed to buy this contact information because people don't want unsolicited emails and unsolicited outreach. It's much more more effective to take a demand gen approach and build an email list through adding value through effective marketing. Same goes with paying third-party vendors. You can pay, you know, the Harvard Business Review to run a webinar for you and get 1,000 leads, but it's never really going to convert to revenue unless you're able to build a strong brand on your own terms. If you're doing it with Harvard Business Review, Forbes, whoever, you're really renting a list of subscribers. You're not really earning that audience. So that's worthwhile of keeping in mind, especially with vendors that work with lots of different companies like yours. They tend to not convert very, very well, and it's very, very expensive unless you can make it a really strong strategic piece for your company. What I advocate for on the demand gen side is hosting your own webinars, you know, hosting a podcast or participating in a podcast, advertising on relevant podcasts that your audience listens to. Podcast advertising is very cost effective right now, and I've seen it convert for my current company. And then also using paid advertising to attract people to consume your content and not just forcing them to fill in forms. So, you know, any of you that have sales teams or plan to have sales teams in the future, as a CEO, as a leader, you will be asking, you know, how are my salespeople spending their time? So this is an example of a lead gen strategy where salespeople tend to spend their time. And the hard truth here is that a lot of them will spend their time on low-intent lead follow-up, which is a lot of, you know, calling people that don't wanna hear from you, bad data, unsuccessful prospecting, and a lot of wasted time essentially. Versus from a demand generation approach, what I've seen is that Yes, the volume is lower, which tends to scare people. You know, we've got far fewer leads, but if they're higher intent, it's more likely they're going to convert to opportunities. And then you have your sales team actively working deals where there is a project, there is a strong likelihood that this prospect is going to convert to a customer. In terms of demand gen versus lead gen a little bit further. So if your sales team is working low-intent leads, these people tend to have very low or zero brand awareness for who your startup is, and it can be very challenging then to have conversations you know, in a follow-up capacity or outbound. But we see that, you know, if you have really talented SDRs, you have talented AEs that are very persistent, it's likely that someone will eventually agree to have a meeting after many touchpoints, but they're very unlikely to convert to a customer. And then the efficiency of your sales team is just very low. So how do you create and implement a demand gen strategy? My advice is to hire a marketing leader who can build your brand. So build that brand awareness for who you are, what you do, the pain points that you solve, and then capture the demand. So capture the 5% that are in market to buy. And we often do that through making sure that your website is visible on the internet, that it appears for relevant search terms, using Google Ads, using LinkedIn advertising if your sales deal, average deal size is big enough, podcasts advertising. There are tons of ways that you can do it. And really the best marketing leaders are able to capture the 5% while building brand awareness with the 95% who are not in market to buy. Of course, one marketing leader can't do everything on their own. So Hiring someone who's able to retain a world-class team is very important, that they know what their strengths are and who they should hire to kind of optimize for their weaknesses. The other thing I think is extremely important is that you're hiring a marketing leader who's able to work really well with sales. The sales team, the sales leader, they're on the same page with them. They're also able to speak with product and understand the value of the product and be aligned on roadmap and product announcements and releases and everything. And then of course, partnerships can play a really important role for growing your business and getting from one significant milestone to another. Thinking like a CEO. We're seeing more and more marketing leaders who really understand how to think like a CEO. You know, the importance of strong fundamentals, strong unit economics. It's not just about, you know, vanity metrics and making things look pretty. The modern marketing leader is able to run an efficient business that's profitable. Finally, hiring a marketing leader who can actively engage with customers. They need to truly know your customer, build a relationship with your customer, and advocate for your customer in discussions with other teams. Finally, the top, the, the, The title of this talk was Hiring a Marketing Team to Do Lead Gen is a Bad Idea. And those reasons, if it wasn't clear enough throughout this presentation, the first one is that if you're following, if you're hiring a marketing team to do lead gen, those opportunities will rarely ever close. Your sales team will waste time on low-intent leads. And the sales team wasting time costs you a lot of money. You will also report inflated pipeline numbers. If we go back to the, the slide of the two funnels, the funnel to the right, you know, if you look at the top of the funnel and you see the 20,000 leads, you as a CEO will think, yeah, we've got tons of pipeline. But if those opportunities don't have intent to actually become customers, you will be presenting inflated numbers back to your board and your other investors. Finally, lead generation, focusing on, you know, low cost per lead. You're still talking about, you know, 20,000 leads multiplied by any number is extremely high in terms of your customer acquisition cost. And that's really what your business is measured on, how expensive it is to acquire a customer, customer lifetime value, all of the costs that are incurred within your business. And I know right now with the economy, efficiency is valued far more than growth at all costs, which is, you know, what was valued a few years ago. So it's really, really important that you're thinking about efficient customer acquisition, over just acquisition at all cost. Finally, if any of you would like help building a demand gen strategy, it's something I work with companies on and I'd be happy to chat with you. And thank you for your time. And this is a link to my LinkedIn. I would love to connect with you. And yeah, thank you for having me to speak and I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.

Great. Okay, you can stop sharing your screen so we can see everyone. I already see questions coming in. Feel free to keep typing them out. We're gonna get through them. So ask your questions. I'm also going to ask if you want to ask them out loud. Of course, this is conversational, and we want your voice to be heard. Um, so First question, you did mention different channels, specifically how much you've been putting into podcasting lately for demand generation. If you had an additional $10K in the budget, where are you prioritizing it?

I think for me personally, we're seeing a lot of traction on the digital front. So we're investing a lot in LinkedIn ads. I also, like I did mention, podcast advertising. The reason why I really like it is because you don't need a graphic designer, you don't need your ad campaigns to be set up and have UTMs tracking all of that. Podcast advertising I think is extremely effective for, you know, smaller businesses because all you need is, you know, to find the podcast that you think will resonate and then come up with what the ad copy is going to be. And you can change it very quickly. So I do like that one. But I'm kind of a hardcore LinkedIn Ads person just as a B2B marketer.

That is a great point on the design costs for that as well. For the blended funnel that you did share, there was a question if this is real data or meant for educational purposes.

I believe it's real data from a customer, like an anonymous customer, or else like a blend of customers of this B2B marketing agency called Refine Labs. And I could tell you it looks like an exaggeration, but I've honestly been part of businesses that have had funnels like that, and I've contributed leads to a funnel like that thinking I was doing the right thing. And it's soul-crushing as a marketer or a sales leader if you look at, you know, how poor your conversion rates are. So don't think it's a big exaggeration. It's genuinely very common to see numbers like that and conversion rates like that in B2B.

We will try to keep this non-soul-crushing. Annie, I know you asked a question in the chat. Would you like to unmute yourself and ask it, or would you like me to?

Hi, I'm happy to ask. Just wondering about demand generation for startups and a recommended budget.

For advertising, especially in the digital space?

So you mentioned LinkedIn, podcasts, things like that.

Can you just give us some ballpark numbers?

I think it's challenging to give ballpark numbers without knowing a lot about your business. I think it really depends like what your average deal size is, how long your sales cycle is, how much cash you have, what your burn rate is, what your goals are. Like it, It really is an art and a science in terms of what's best for each unique business. I have, I think this, I can give you like the smallest budget I've had discretionary for demand gen was like $10K per month. I think if you have less than $10K per month, you're really going to struggle to do anything. And that was not including some of the conferences that we were sponsoring that year. And I can say Conferences are interesting for startups because you can often get very inexpensive sponsorship packages to be in the startup zone. And, you know, executive buyers love to go to the startup zone because they think it's where all the innovation is, right? Which, which is true. So I would then change my perspective on big conferences as you grow in size, because I think getting a bigger booth and having a bigger presence on a show floor often does not yield an increase in ROI from a show. So I hope that's helpful. It is. Thank you. Welcome.

Thank you, Annie. Um, TJ, you have a question in the chat if you would like to unmute yourself and ask.

Sure. Yeah.

Just thinking about the, the blended funnel slide, particularly on the left, like, are there any specific actions that your marketing team, Sarah, does to help increase that MQL to ops conversion rate to support the sales team and kind of help them get better, essentially?

I think targeting is extremely important, like being very clear who your ideal customer profile is in terms of, you know, the job role or like the roles involved in the buying committee. The, the industries that you have the highest likelihood of success in, um, you know, case studies that you have of similar companies is extremely helpful. So if you can get case studies from early customers, I think that is very impactful. Um, we have been experimenting with influencers. So we're selling— Hunters is a cybersecurity startup. We're selling to chief information security officers. So we're working with people who have worked as a chief information security officer in the past for very large organizations, and we're working with these influencers in a very subtle way where we're bringing them into the community and they will bring up Hunters as a suggestion to a trusted colleague when appropriate. So I think those things, it's like, it's the closer you can get to, you know, being like the trustworthy people within your community and get that kind of advocacy from people, whether it's current customers or people with, you know, influencers that you work with, I think that can be extremely effective in increasing your conversion rates.

Great. Thank you.

Welcome.

Thank you, TJ. I am going to do my best on pronouncing this name. Menachem.

Menachem. Very close.

Nice effort there.

Thank you.

I get that all the time. So Sarah, really interested in what you've got to say so far. And I was wondering the following. So there's obviously a lot of different channels that you can go about to use Demand Gen.

Right?

There's paid advertising, there's events, podcasts, whatever. How do you go about determining where you're gonna get the most ROI for your buck, you know, in your specific industry? Because I imagine that probably, you know, the different channels provide different value depending on which industry you're in. So how do you go about determining what's the best channel for you?

I think it's always a mixture. I think, you know, a lot of us will underestimate the amount of time and effort and money that goes into something simple like maintaining your website, making sure it's, you know, not only fit for purpose but optimized for conversion. So I think when we break down the marketing budget, there are so many line items that might surprise you in terms of where the budget is going. And in some industries, it's really important to work with analyst firms. So that's almost, we consider it almost a tax that we need to pay because you're not, if you're working with an analyst firm and you're an early stage startup, you run the risk with, if you don't work with them, you run the risk of not being included in certain reports and guides that are important to your some of your buyers, but if you choose to work with them, you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for years without seeing a return. And you as the early stage marketing leader, you're kind of, you know, questioning, will everything go to plan and I'll be here a long time and I'll reap the rewards of this investment? Or will it be, you know, short term, the startup could struggle financially and we never see the reward from the hundreds of thousands spent on this area. So I think it's, it's really challenging. There are many areas that you have to invest a little bit in. And then I think a lot of it is testing, right? It's, it's what, where are people hearing about you from. One thing we did at Hunters, which, you know, is the first thing I always tackle when I arrive at a new business, is the demo request or the talk-to-sales process. How are people requesting a demo? How easy or difficult is that process? What does the form look like? And then adding a section at the bottom that says, like, how did you hear about you know, our company. And we do it as an open text field. This is a common practice in B2B now. And people will type in, you know, I heard from a colleague, or I heard from this customer, or I heard through LinkedIn, or heard on specific podcast. And that information can be extremely helpful to fill in the dots of, you know, no marketing leader is going to come in and say, this is exactly where you should spend your money. This is where we're going to see our return. They're going to say, You know, demand generation is like smart portfolio management for investing. You need to place a few small bets and then give it time, see what's, you know, what's coming back to us. And then over time, based on the data that you'll have, you know, within all of your analytics, your Salesforce, etc., and then you'll have your— so that's your quantitative data, and then you'll have your qualitative data, which is the anecdotes you're hearing from early-stage customers, your sales team, and also like filling in this free text form. Um, using both of those data points, you will then be able to say, okay, you know, report back to your CEO, here's where we're seeing the most impact. This is where we should be spending our money. And then you'll always— like, nothing— you'll never have, um, a marketing budget that's 100% attributable. So you won't be able to like say, okay, everything— this is exactly how much pipeline and revenue is coming from every single dollar I'm spending in my budget. But the goal is that you will be able to feel confident in reporting on, okay, 70% of our pipeline is coming from these areas, but I believe we need to do this much testing on things that are completely unproven so that we can continue to find new areas of driving success. And then there are the, like, taxes and the other, you know, areas that you have to invest in even if they're not going to, um, show direct impact.

Got it. So just to make sure that I understood that, like, in short, in the beginning, maybe the first 1 or 2 years of your startup when you just start like, you know, hiring head of demand gen, head of marketing, it's basically impossible to know where the real ROI is gonna come from. You've gotta invest in all the classic channels and then test your customer base, ask them where they're coming from. And as you gather more and more data, you'll be able to specialize more. Is that sort of what you're saying?

I would say yes, with the caveat of I would wanna hire a marketing leader who has a little bit more experience and can kind of, you know, they've done something similar before and they've worked with a similar caliber startup. They could say it's most likely that this will work. And I also think if you're going to invest in every channel, you're going to be doing vanilla marketing versus if you can really, really focus on an area that you think is going to work, you have a better chance of like making one thing successful first and then building from there. And I can give you an example. So we decided to focus on building our LinkedIn, like organic LinkedIn, as well as doing paid LinkedIn. And we built our LinkedIn following to like 10,000 people within like 18 months maybe. And that's something that's regarded highly by our sales reps, by our CEO. It was like a company goal of like, let's reach 10K followers. We haven't invested in Twitter. We're not doing TikTok. You know, we, we're not doing Facebook. So like, I think You know, if you think of channels as like you need to do website, you need to do a little bit of social media, I would say yes, you don't need to be absolutely everywhere and doing everything because you'll be stretched too thin.

On the topic of organic, is it possible to launch a SaaS company without a marketing budget or ad investment? Can warm leads succeed in this day and age?

Can you repeat the question again?

Is it possible to launch a SaaS company without a marketing budget or ad investment? Can warm leads succeed in this day and age?

I think like if the question is, can you, can you launch a SaaS company without any marketing investment? I think it will— you'll really struggle without a website, and I think a website requires investment probably more than, more than you'd expect. Even for a very, very basic one, you need a brand name, you know, you need like contact us information, you probably need a CRM of some sorts. So I do think you need the basics, but I think you can probably, like, if the product is really, really good and you've got a strong network and the people working there are really talented, I think you can probably get pretty far without a big investment in marketing. But I think if you hope to become a big successful company, if you hope to reach $50 million ARR, $100 million ARR, the longer you wait to invest in your marketing team or you invest in your brand, the harder it's going to be in the long run. So if you think that postponing the investment is saving you money and benefiting you, you're building up a lot of debt that's going to be— it's going to have to be faced at some point. And it's probably going to be harder to bring in a great marketing leader if they know they have a lot of debt to tackle as soon as they get in the door.

Thank you. If there's any follow-up on that question, let me know in the chat. But David, I know you have a question if you would like to unmute yourself and ask.

Yeah.

Hi, Sarah. Uh, curious, you talk a lot about lead gen and demand gen, uh, as two different, uh, I guess, tactics or strategies. Um, how much effort do you put into converting those leads that convert poorly, right, when handed to sales, to turning them into your demand gen funnel? And are there any tactics or specific— yes, specific tactics that are effective in converting that lead gen to DemandGen?

So we tend— like, I tend to get everyone kind of deprioritizing leads, and we think of leads as just people's contact information, but with zero intent to kind of hear from us. And then I think of like what we talk about is opportunities, right? That people that have an active opportunity or we have categorized people as like MQL, that's like in nurture. So they're, they're not ready to buy now, but they might want to hear from us. Like people will tell you, you know, I've renewed my contract for this year. Can you reach out to me? Halfway through next year and we'll set, you know, tasks for follow-up and we'll put them in a specific place within our CRM so we're able to get back in contact versus we're not in the, the practice of collecting a lot of like what you would call leads because there's no real value in having them within our CRM. Unless they want to subscribe to like updates from us. So if they want to get our content, they can subscribe and we'll have them in the database. We don't make a huge push to convert people. Like in the past, I've been with companies that are really focused on like nurture emails, nurture streams. Like we need to put people in the stream and send them emails until they convert. I haven't seen that work very well in the past. What we tend to do instead is nurture people through advertising. So there are low-cost ways that you can do, you can run LinkedIn ads and people will hear about us through other ways. We'll be at the conferences every year and we also—

So just as a follow-on, do you not believe in, and it's fine, I have no opinion on it, right? Do you not believe in like the top of funnel, like the ebook or the webinar or those low-intent content forms, is that not part of your strategy?

I believe in the content.

Yeah.

I don't believe in like collecting people's information. Got it. Just to have it.

So more ungated.

Yeah. Yeah.

To educate. Okay, perfect. Thank you. That's very helpful.

Welcome. Yeah, like it's a kind of a, it's a bold approach at the moment. Like not a lot of companies are are doing this, but once you can show that it's working from a— like salespeople are wasting less time, it's far more effective from a time spent perspective. Like, honestly, it can be challenging to move people to this mindset, but I believe this is where the industry is going.

Great. Thank you. If you had double your 2023 budget, What would you add on?

Might sound controversial, but I don't— I'm not the marketer that wants a huge budget. Like, I believe that a lot of the best marketing can be done like without spending a huge amount of money. And the best marketing to me is getting subject matter experts, like people who are either customers or they're working directly with customers and they're feeling the pain that we're trying to solve. People who can talk about these topics, essentially show and tell the pain and then the value of the solution. Like that's what it is for me. Like, I just think the more content we can create that's going to resonate with people, the better. I don't believe in spending a fortune on in-person events or big conference booths or billboards or Super Bowl ads. I really think if we can, uh, just nail the message, um, and the delivery of the message, then will be, you know, will hit all of our goals. I don't think more budget is really going to solve the problem. And quite frankly, you know, companies having too much budget has kind of got us into a sticky situation with the economy right now, and especially in the tech sector.

Any follow-up on that, let me know. Loving all these controversial answers. What a great conversation. We do have another question in the chat, so if you do want to unmute yourself and ask Dr. Alexandra, let me know. Okay. Oh, here we go.

Ah, all right. My question was, what kind of tech tools have you discovered in 2023 T2 that you are so excited about? Part of your tech stack or, you know, personal or work-wise? Great question. Um, so, you know, working at previous companies, I think I've seen people advocate for tech, like, we need more tech, or everybody wants their own tech. Like, I've worked at companies where we've had Monday.com and Asana and Confluence, Jira, you know, like all of, all of these tools that serve the same function, but people want the one that they've used before. So I was very mindful when I joined Hunters to kind of strip back all of the tech and like the only thing I really need is a demand gen professional is like, you know, give me a LinkedIn Ads campaign and a Canva account where I can create things from scratch. And, you know, I use a lot of the Google Suite, so I think you can do things from the, the, you know, the basics. And we use HubSpot as our marketing CRM and Salesforce as our sales CRM. So I think that's kind of the basic tech stack for a very early stage startup. Um, since we've kind of graduated to a slightly larger stage, we are bringing in Chili Piper, um, for lead routing. So when people request a demo, Chili Piper has intelligence where it can route it, the, the person's request, to the right salesperson. And so we were doing it without lead routing, um, before now, and it was just a bit chaotic. Like, you can hack it together, but it's It's chaos. And so we're using Chili Piper and we also just purchased 6Sense. So I can't give anyone any recommendations yet because we are getting onboarded by them starting next week. But we've evaluated all of their competitors and really what we're trying to do is help our sales team identify that 5% that's in market to buy that won't kind of raise their hand to us. Maybe they don't— they're not aware of Hunters, but they're evaluating similar solutions. So we want to use it as a tool to inform our advertising capabilities. So like improve the targeting of our ads and also pass the intelligence to the sales team where they can do outbound to high-intent prospects.

Great. I know we are Way over time. So just one more wrap-up question because you are our first guest of 2023. Um, what was your biggest lesson of 2022 and what are you most excited about for 2023?

The biggest lesson, I think this— so last December, so like December of 2021, after Hunter's had grown the revenue significantly and gotten funding, it felt like the only problem we had was like we couldn't hire people fast enough. And if we were to just hire more people, that everything would be great. I think that's a huge mistake that, you know, we felt as a marketing team. And I think a lot of companies have made the same mistake where you're kind of throwing people at problems, you know, new people, and not considering, you know, how long it takes for people to get onboarded and understand the context of the business. I think, you know, we need to— if you feel like you need more people because there's just so much to do, I think what I would have done instead is like take a step back and just think about, okay, priorities. We probably don't have like people problems, we probably have focus problems. We need to be more focused and not bite off more than we can chew and be very careful about, you know, strategic priorities and not just focus on hiring because hiring is all-consuming. And then you need to do onboarding and management. So I think that's probably the, the biggest challenge and the biggest maybe mistake that tech companies made in general last year. And I think this year everyone realizes we have to be a lot more resourceful and a lot more focused.

Great. And to end on a high, our focus for 2023 or something you're looking forward to.

I'm going to Tel Aviv in 2 weeks for our company kickoff, so I'm really looking forward to that just to get to meet people in person and do a little bit of travel. And I think, you know, I haven't been a lot, a lot. I haven't been around long enough to like give this group a lot of wisdom. I feel like all of you probably have more wisdom than me. But, you know, what I've heard is tougher economic times build stronger businesses and they build stronger professionals. So I'm confident that this year will teach a lot of us important lessons. And I think that, you know, any startup that can make it through more challenging economic times will be a stronger, better business.

Great. Thank you so much, Sarah. That was wonderful. We have a lot of positive messages in the chat about how informative that was. So thank you so much. And thank you everyone for joining our first session of 2023. Don't worry, we have a lot more coming this year. We will be back next week with Sales-Led vs. Product-Led: Today's Startups Need Both with Jason M. Lemkin. He is CRO at Harness.io. And thank you again, Sarah, so much for kicking us off. Truly wonderful. Bye, everyone.

Thanks, everyone.