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Small bites of insight to unlock your pipeline strategy
Where GTM Leaders share their secret ingredients for modern pipeline generation—a flavor for every diet.
Andrew McGuire:
I'm thrilled to welcome our guest today, Abdullah Alf Hakim, who has mastered the art of Turning Data insights into revenue opportunities and currently leading digital marketing at abnormal security. And today we're diving into something that most B2B companies are completely overlooking the Gold Knight of buyer intent and product sentiment hiding in plain sight on Reddit of all places. Yep. Reddit and Abdullah will share his perspective on why the conventional wisdom about pipeline generation might be holding companies back. So go grab your favorite snack and let's dig into what Abdullah has to say. So let's start by understanding why Reddit might be the missing piece and most BB pipeline strategies today. So Abdulah, welcome to the show.
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
Hi Andrew. I'm happy to be here. It was good to see you again. It's been a while. Yeah, let's jump into it. Yeah, so I've been spending a lot of time with paid social. I'm a big fan of, I'm a big believer in advertising and multiple channels. Even for B2B, you should be spending money on LinkedIn, Instagram, even, and Facebook and Reddit. It has been on my radar for a while. Even on my data that armor blocks, we started to actually spend money on Reddi at the end on just ads. Agree simple stuff. But recently if you just go and you do any search in Google, you don't need anything special. You'll see that it shows up really in the top three, four hits of any search you do. If you're looking for any product, any company, anything. It just shows up. Like you see Ray Thread right there, and I believe they have a partnership with Google, so it could be why, but I think I read some of this Three, they, they've grown in their SEO presence by like 1800%. So there,
Andrew McGuire:
And if you really want to go down the conspiracy theory route, Google invested a bunch of money in Reddit right before the IPO, but I'm not, I don't know, I don't know what happened, but
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
All I can tell you, whoever happened, they are showing up extremely high. Any threat you see
Andrew McGuire:
On top
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
Of that, people, maybe it's a generational thing. Do you like what you read on whether they can't trust them more? Of course, if you're a top level of an person, you still got to get a report from the foresters and the Cardinal. But I think a lot of the people at the entry level or the IT specialists, whoever it is they trusted, I think they like the raw format. It just seems more genuine and more so forth. So it's a great place for you to see, are people talking about my product? Are people talking about the topic of interesting me? Now this is extremely hard to do manually, I believe, to go in and, I mean you can look and scan stuff and just get a gist, but now with the other lambs and ai, if you just know what to feed it, you can start to say, well, I want to see what people are Abu me. So well first started looking to see what, is there a way to actually access all the threats?
Whereas I found company could amplify or store online, they actually do all the scraping for you and you have an option for scraping on Reddit. And usually when I find that with them, I'm like, okay, if they can do it, that means there must be APIs for doing it. Right. Those guys don't have anything special. And these shows lot money for each month. I mean say a lot of money, it's $40 a month and I'm like, that's kind of a lot of money if you're just testing out. So I'm like, but if they're doing it, there must be a way. So now I was able to find, yes, of course it is, it's an API, it's available. You open up an account and Reddit as an developer, you get a P access. And then the a i steps are not that complicated. I'm like, cool. So then I also, by the way, there's something I'll say, if you don't know how to do this stuff, just ask AI honestly. Yeah,
Andrew McGuire:
Right. So right now what you're saying is that I as a pipeline generation specialist at B2B SaaS company can go set up a red up developer account, get API access, and then start to do these searches. And then either I know that you're using, which we can talk about another time, but air Ops where I'm deep in the weeds on clay tables and potentially populating clay records with all the things right,
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
You can do on Clay Table, it's the same actually, clay even has a out the box integration with Reddit that you can do stuff for you. Of course they do. Yeah. I'm using just basically a place where you put the steps together, but the software, so API call, which I basically did, if you're stuck Azure, L-G-B-T-A-P-I call, you pull in the a p, you pull the information and then you take the information, you feed it into a step with the other S, you pick the Ls you want. In AOPs, I have the luxury, it's the same thing also I think in Clay where you can pick the other M of choice you want. And I tried a few, and then you tell it, analyze the following, and I want to see this. So I was able to do that and actually get, so why did I put the name of the company?
I would say abnormal. And I'm like, look up for me, all the subreddits that have spoken about abnormal returned to me and I had a limit of 10. Again, test. And then from there I'm like, then I'm like analyze each one so that I had the LMS go analyze each one and return to me a report of this sentiment. Any ate. If it's saying stuff about abnormal, that's good or bad. Also stuff like how often is being mentioned or followed. So literally in seconds, I had the reporters telling me, here's what people are saying about abnormal on Reddit.
Andrew McGuire:
So you can take all of that rich discussion, distill it down into something that I can actually use. And then what's fascinating to me is that more conversations are happening on Reddit around brands and being able to use that. And are you able to actually then take that and figure out what prospects are talking about it based on the users? Or is it just about sentiment data for,
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
Well, you can start to find the Reddit threads are important for you. So there's really a lot of things to do though, right? I'll say,
Andrew McGuire:
What's the one thing, if we're doing one snack with Reddit, what is that one thing that you would want to do to be able to actually generate pipeline?
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
I would take, for me, since I do a lot of money on ads, I would take this sentiment of we're saying, and I would use another LLM to then create ads based on what I'm listening. You can take what people are saying, right?
Andrew McGuire:
Pay is ads, paid ads, not
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
A cold out for this one, but there's a lot of use cases. You should definitely get your product marketers in there that actually be engaged in the conversations. You can even just get intimate and how the product is performing and you tell your team, Hey guys, we need to improve the stuff. And then you can maybe have a post about it and say, Hey, we listened for all these thread and we did that, and that probably will show up for you on some other thread. So if you can show us a brand that we're listening to these concerns that legitimate, and we're addressing them internally and also externally, here's what we did. That's amazing. So instead of if you have a product team, instead of telling them from the product, you tell 'em, guys, here's what people who are actually using the product are saying. And then as a marketer, you can think what people are saying. And if it's true, you can address it. If it's not true, you can run ads and actually use their words that will use S to actually run ads. That will probably, if you complain about something and you all of a sudden you saw an ad that were addressing the pain points you're complaining about, you'll probably open it up and
Andrew McGuire:
See. Yeah. Or think that Apple is listening to you because they have had a lawsuit saying that Mike's been on the whole time and they're serving ads to you. So they might think that it's the Apple lawsuit that happened, but who knows?
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
But
Andrew McGuire:
It's really, really crazy to me that you can take all that sentiment, distill it down, and be able to then turn it into making ads and paid ads that are going to allow you to capture more attention just based on what's happening on Reddit. I was thinking more about the clay table piece of cold outbound, but
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
Well, the thing with Reddit, unlike other platforms, the only, I mean, you don't really know who the person is. They all have this funding numbers and names. So it can really enrich the person if you could be amazing. But eventually, also, most companies, and this actually I'm exploring now, I'm still in the early days here at Abnormal, is you need to have your own thread as a company too, right? Need to be able to, but it needs to be a fine line between a thread that's useful for the community and thread that is not overly all about.
Andrew McGuire:
But then you got another thing to manage, right? Do you want to actually build out a Reddit thread for the company to manage?
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
I think Red Red now is so massive, it's so huge. It's not going anywhere that you need to have a strategy for Reddit. I think it's that big. I actually just read a blog the other day on ops talking about Reddit and all the things. It is just so massive that I don't think you can just ignore it and just say
Andrew McGuire:
Fine, because it's showing up and all the threads. Yeah, but what about, I mean, if you were to order it, is it LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, or how would you organize what the top three?
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
I think LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube is not bad. Yeah, I mean I think Reddit is just, its early days according to whether it's just an awareness play. It's not going to be a major lead gen play. But I think as an awareness as a brand, you need to be honest. I mean, it just shows up. I mean, like I said, you put in any company's name, you'll see
Andrew McGuire:
You have a strategy in a playbook for how a brand should create their Reddit.
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
No, I don't have a strategy yet.
Andrew McGuire:
I don't think anybody does for B.
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
No, I one does. No, but I read this big article there.
Andrew McGuire:
Alright, so whoever's listening to this go create the B2B SaaS, Reddit play and playbook and come back and give it to
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
Us. If you can tell a company, if you have an agency something and you tell a company, we know how to build this for you in Reddit, it's amazing, right? I mean I can run ads, that's fine, but it's how to really own the conversation, how to be a part of the conversation, how to be sure that when people are seeing any thread about our company that we are in there. So yeah, so I just think it's really massive that people are getting one way, it's a key way. People I'll say are kind of understanding your company and your party. You can't just ignore, it's like saying, I'm not going to spend any money on the force or the Gartner and Notto enterprise. We cannot do
Andrew McGuire:
That. You
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
Have to know is there a clear lead gen from that? No, but you know that if you're a CISO and you're sold into enterprise companies, you got to be in the magic quadrant. I mean, you just have to be, they're not going to buy from you in time as a practitioners. Also, as I ask you too, we found that most of the comments in Reddit about abnormal were not from the CSOs, was from the entry level staff. People are actually using a part every day. So it's actually very illuminating to understand what calm pain points they're going through or issues to come address, right?
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. Very cool. So very cool stuff. So for Reddit, the number one play is to capture the sentiment to turn it into a paid ad strategy and the second piece of building a B2B SaaS playbook for how you can join the conversation. And the third thing of being able to actually read those threads of what the, the entry level people are doing within Reddit. So that is the snack for today. But I do ask all my guests one closing question, which is, what is the number one belief about pipe gen in 25 that the market has completely wrong and how should companies be thinking about doing it differently to unlock their big opportunities?
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
Market has completely wrong. That's a good question. I mean, I'm always calm. I feel like I'm at the edge of testing out of seeing new stuff, but I think AI and efficiency is just going to play a huge factor. But I think people are saying that I think what people are wrong is going to be how many companies are actually doing it effectively?
Andrew McGuire:
Doing it well, they
Abdallah Al-Hakim:
Are still talking about it. I think I'm living in a bit of a bubble where I hear it all the time, but I think that's still 1% of people by AI and efficiency is going to be a huge part to help you. But I think it's still going to be underdone for the year. Despite what everyone is saying. I think a lot of people are still wondering, is this real, this not? Which to me is shocking, but
Andrew McGuire:
It's real and it's all here. I a human talking to another human, but soon you may be seeing my digital twin. We'll see. Alright, was that, let's wrap it there. Abdullah, thank you for joining me on the Go-to-Market Snacks pod and I'm looking forward to seeing everybody in the next one. Peace.