Make this analysis for 2023

This analysis will help you make the best decisions for 2023 to grow your revenue.

Show Notes

The budget always has one important line: Revenue. But behind that line you'll find very little detail.

If the plan is being made for 2023, we cover a simple analysis you should run to ensure the business can actually reach the targets desired.

Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:01:12] Mikkel: good. So we've talked a bit about models in, previous episode be building a model for an operating model to grow your revenue. Yeah. Right. And in that episode we talked a bit about, well, are people actually gonna. know, that model, you bring forward those numbers. And, and we've talked a bit about in the past also becoming, you know, that strategic partner, if you're working in revenue operations, where people, they actually listen and take action on the back of the, the advice that you're giving.
[00:01:43] Toni: And I think the, the other perspective that we also gained since then, actually we just had a, a meetup in Berlin, Revenue Ops meet up and we had a couple of those conversations with folks there. and some of them were basically, also talking about this internally, but more from an analysis perspective.
[00:01:59] Actually not instrumenting it as a tool, but more as a Hey is a one off. I looked into. Here's some insights perspective and, and I think today we wanted to basically explore that angle just a little bit more.
[00:02:11] Mikkel: Yeah. Because we, we basically wanna see if we can create a stepping stone For the listener out there to become that strategic partner and eventually run qbr, deploy and operating model.
[00:02:22] And you need to take the steps in order to gain the trust effectively. And right now what's happening is, if it's not done already, a lot of. Is being made for 23, that means a budget that defines where are we gonna put what money. Right. And, and on the other side you're gonna have the targets. And what is really hard for companies is to figure out what can this engine actually do, Right?
[00:02:46] Toni: Yeah. I think, I think there are a couple of different, you know, routes towards that, That way of thinking. I think there is a. Let's start with do we even know what's working well for us? You know, that that could even be the first part of a conversation. And, and, you know, one of my stories is here, before, before I did that, Basically the whole organization was saying that outbound doesn't work.
[00:03:13] It's just lazy high schoolers sitting around scrolling Facebook. and then after I've done that calculation, it turns out that that was actually the best thing since slice bread
[00:03:23] Mikkel: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:23] Toni: and, so, so this might sometimes be helping you and the rest of the organization to understand. Which channels are good, which channels aren't, And not only from a perspective of, you know, what is driving money and what is bringing attribution, but potentially also in a way of, what is efficient growth in terms of c payback.
[00:03:41] what is scalable growth? What can you repeat? We also talked about this, recently on the show. So I think this is, this is really the, the first piece of understanding which of my channels actually work well. Could be regions, it could be products, it could be segments, it could be industries that you can, you can, you know, tailor it to whatever you think is important for you.
[00:04:00] And then once you have, you know, gain that understanding, then the critical next step is to try and use it. and, and using it, potentially might happen actually in some of the, budgeting work. Happening has happened or is going on, right now in the organization. And the, the point here is that, and this is really what Mikkel is, is pointing out, there's usually a bit of a gap.
[00:04:27] And you know, this is one of the things that we as globals actually, you know, trying to address and fix in the market. There's usually a gap between. Your budget, which is really detailed about costs and talking really nicely about, Hey, you know, this, those are the salaries, those are the taxes. Here's your lunch expense.
[00:04:42] And, and creating a p and l and balance sheet from that, you know, from that to this is the revenue line item that the whole budget is built up on. those things usually there, there's a bit of a gap there. And the, you know what this analysis can help you is to. if not your cfo, but steer your commercial leaders in figuring out what is the best way from A to B.
[00:05:07], because sometimes you might be constrained, from a budget perspective and actually to hit those tags. And, you know, this could be analysis that, definitely can, help you also elevate in the organization and, and bring like some real strategic rev ops, value to the place. Right?
[00:05:26] Mikkel: Becoming, bringing some business acumen into it is what is what it is. Right. And I think we talked a bit about, there's also a factor right now with, with the way the market is that you know, might shift what the priorities are.
[00:05:37] Is it really revenue growth at a certain pace? Is it more payback? That's becoming important. So what we're gonna get into now is really. One analysis that can start, changing things not only for the business, but also how you are perceived and what impact you can make on the business in the long run effectively.
[00:05:57] Toni: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:58] Mikkel: So let's, let's jump into the, the analysis.
[00:06:01] Toni: Yeah. So step one, and this is a bit of a recap from, couple of other episodes.
[00:06:09] Step one is the realization. How revenue is actually being built in your organization. If you and the organization is still of the belief that it's a number of account executives and their quota times the ramp, that there might be on of productivity number. If that is how you look at this, is how revenue's being built, then that show here is, is probably gonna take you three or four levels further than that.
[00:06:37] And I'm not sure if we're gonna achieve that step by step. Right. the, the, the, the real important piece for, for this to work out is, you have come to the realization that the way to generate revenue is, and you know, I'm just gonna say opportunities could be leads, it could be other things, but opportunities times conversion rate times acv, meaning average contract value, times time.
[00:07:00] The sales cycle or velocity, or everyone call it that equals revenue, You've already moved on from, hey, it's not based on the amount of reps that we have, counter executives and their quota. It's actually based on the funnel, right? And then the first realization is, okay, cool. now that I, that I know that it's about opportunities.
[00:07:21] How do I, how do I go about it? what, what can I actually do in order to. create an overview of how efficient and how, how valuable this thing is. The first step will be you will, look at your overall. Revenue that you generate and the cost that you had to put in in order to get there, which is then called the C payback, and it will give you a certain number.
[00:07:44] That certain number is great, but it really doesn't give you any insights of what really is going on in your, in your revenue engine. It's really a mix of all things happening Right. So really the first step that, I talk and we talk actually, the first step is to figure out what are the important dimensions for my organization.
[00:08:03] That I wanna split this thing by. Right. And the first idea, in our case was, well, it's split it by outbound versus inbound. Let's start super easy peasy here. And basically say, Okay. those opportunities, and we are not talking perfect attribution either. This is not a 100% data quality.
[00:08:24] Everything needs to be perfect kind of situation. This is a 90% is totally okay situation. So you start with, what were, all the opportunities that we generated in the last six to nine months?, for outbound? Yeah. Or through outbound. And that might be, SDRs. Calling those people, in the, in the purest sense.
[00:08:44] It might also be in this more, high contrast black and white world, it might be also account executives doing sales prospecting, right? That's all the stuff throw into the, outbound opportunities. And then on the inbound opportunities, you have everything basic coming from. Yeah, that's how we would think about it. And then there those weird crossovers where, and I just wanna kind of, I wanna get really like nerdy on this.
[00:09:06] Then there those weird crossovers where you have a lead that was generated a year ago from marketing and now an S st R booked that account. Is it outbound or inbound? Toni and my world, it is outbound. the, the attribution for the opportunity creation should come, know, what was the last touch?
[00:09:23] Creating that piece instead of, someone downloaded Zoom, zoom info, put their name against it, and now everything is fromm, doesn't work like that. So it's really kind of who, who created the last piece in order to get to the opportunity stage. Right? And then you will, you will basically come up with a fairly unambiguous lift list of opportunities, inbound opportunities, and then you'd look at all of.
[00:09:47] You'll figure out, how much revenue each of them closed, which is, you know, one part of the equation. And then you look at the other piece, which is, okay, how much money did both of them cost us actually, Right? How much money did we pay? All of those SDRs? How much money did we pay for tooling, for those SDRs, for recruiting?
[00:10:03] Maybe for all, all kinds of things. That's an easy outbound. And then on the inbound cost, you basically take all the salaries, all the ad spend, all the tooling, everything that's in there. By the way, in order to achieve this, you need to have good ways in with finance. and then the, the, the, the piece that some people struggle a little bit with was, is. Oh no. those account executives, they're kind of working on both things here. They're working on inbound and they're working on outbound. So how do you, how do you distribute cost? And I think once you come to that question, and once you ask, How should I distribute cost?. Everyone is like, Oh, fuck no. Now I figured I figured this out immediately.
[00:10:42] I think a few people get to the point of actually saying like, Oh wait, let's, how, how should I do this actually? And there are a couple of different ways. I would keep it super simple. I would probably base it on, amounts of opportunity received. You can do it super fancy on. basically, sales cycles and so forth or activities or close one opportunities.
[00:11:03] There are many different you could choose, but keep it simple on opportunities received. So let's just say you have an account executive team, and you know, their cost and their commissions and their manager and so forth. That's the cost base. How do you split it, you know, towards the different streams?
[00:11:17] if you have a thousand opportunities, 400 from marketing and 600 from outbound, you. You know, split that cost base. 40, 60. Yeah. That's basically how I do it. And now you have a very clear overview of how much money did you spend on marketing, both on the department and ads, but also how much processing time of the account executives was used on this.
[00:11:39] Okay. The cost, this is now your m c. This is your true marketing, customer acquisition cost, by the way. And then you, put this against what those marketing opportunities produce in terms of revenue, and now you have a tech payback for marketing, and then you do the rest. Basically, inverse of this for outbound.
[00:11:58] And now you will probably have two very different numbers from the overall number that you look at. You will, you know, the overall number is just a mix of those two And now you kind of have, see different, different levels here.
[00:12:10] Mikkel: So, quick question, right? So there's a. Bunch of numbers you need to get ahold of and some of these might be tricky salary, it's gonna be potentially pretty hard.
[00:12:18] How much, even on cost side, how accurate for this analysis to be impactful? Do you need, can you make assumptions, for example, on salary? You know, just think about the reality that there might be a listener out there where it's not gonna be that easy to get all the data.
[00:12:33] Toni: the, the trick I would use to keep it very accurate, instead of saying, Okay, I need to know how much Mikkel makes, Toni makes, how much. Anton makes and so forth. You basically go to, finance and say, Can you give me the sum total of, you know, this department and define the department by such and such?
[00:12:55] and that's it. You can, you can deal in sums instead of in the units below, which makes it a less so scary conversation with finance, by the way. By far. Yeah. And I,
[00:13:07] Mikkel: I bet also if you, if you're still running against the wall telling them what you actually need it for, they might start getting interested.
[00:13:15] Toni: I think they might get something interested. They might, you know, some finance teams might, you know, spreading the elbows, defensive about it. And so you do it in an Excel spreadsheet. I do it in an Excel spreadsheet. So there, there might be a little bit of that, and maybe that's a future episode here somewhere.
[00:13:28] But not, you know, I, I think this can be overcome. By the way, if you are a RevOps, this is 1000% for you. If you are a revenue leader, you should probably kind of send this episode to your rev, to figure this out. But revenue leaders usually have budget authority, and they usually can basically tell finance to give you those numbers, by the way.
[00:13:50] So, so, you know, they're a couple of ways into getting this. I don't think this is super secretive, but obviously you need to be careful about this just a little bit, right?
[00:13:59] Mikkel: And then, so basically you end at the point where you've. CAC pay. Between inbound and outbound. And a lot of companies are gonna, well, some of the mature these, they're gonna do that. It's fairly common. What is the next step? Well,
[00:14:12] Toni: So I, I recently talked to Ray Rike and he told me that, 80 to 85% of organizations don't do it. And he asked me actually why. so it's like, it's like we are talking, a lot of companies don't do this stuff, right. but the next step I would probably do, And depends on how large your organization is.
[00:14:30], you probably might be working on more than just one region, one country, one territory. I would suggest you also split it by region. Hmm. in Europe that's fairly standard and straightforward and important because you have all of those different languages and you basically have different sales teams.
[00:14:48] So all of those different languages in the US it's, you know, it might be a West coast, East coast thing. It might be US versus international and so forth. Right. But you know, you basically, Create more insights and understanding what are the buckets you're dealing with actually, Right? And again, how, how would you do this?
[00:15:05] So you take your, and you know by now I think people might get it. You take your outbound bucket, you realize, how many outbounds were created for EMEA versus for the us You split those two, you split the AEs based on where they're sitting now. You don't need to do it by a key. Now you know exactly where they're sitting actually and so forth. Right?
[00:15:26] You, you, you get the point. You might now be left with four different buckets, inbound us, outbound US in, bonamia out, Bonamia, right? And again, those four numbers will tell you a completely different story about. You know, all, all of this stuff. Then the overall, you know, I have a 21 month ke payback for the whole business.
[00:15:47] Right. Which is basically fairly useless to deal with. what you will see is that, and this is random guessing, what you will see is that US is usually more expensive than EMEA.
[00:16:00] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:16:01] Toni: And there are two reasons for that. Reason number one, From our very much, European perspective. you, you have this as your home turf and then you expand somewhere else and then expanding somewhere else.
[00:16:13] Low maturity, fewer, fewer people know you on the market, et cetera, tends to be more expensive. But then there's also the other side, even if you are in the us, usually it's much more competitive in the US Where wherever anyone founds a. Is it Israel, Denmark, Portugal. What's the second or third market they're gonna expand to?
[00:16:33] It's the us. Everyone goes to the US and basically, the, the, the winner is crowned in the us. If, if you own Germany, no one, no one cares. winner is crowned in the us
[00:16:44] Mikkel: all the VC money is there as well.
[00:16:45] Toni: No, exactly. That's why also they want you to go there. It's basically like, you either make it there and you're going to be unicorn or you don't make it there, and we don't need to talk to each other But that's, that's what the reason the US is. usually the payback is more expensive there. Right. So
[00:16:58] Mikkel: what do you do if, let's say you run the analysis and you look at, in this case, regions US is very expensive. But it is a priority for you to grow in.
[00:17:07] Toni: Mm-hmm. So now, so first of. It needs to be clear in the organization that it is a priority to growing, and I think it was very much so the case a year ago.
[00:17:18] With abundant cash. Sure. You know, let's have worst kick payback, let's go. I think now some of that might have changed just a little bit, and I think triggering that conversation for your, commercially even for C level. Very interesting. And now the big question you need to, so this is how I sometimes phrase it.
[00:17:35] The big question you need to ask yourself is really, how much of a premium are you willing to pay for US dollar revenue? That is a question you need to ask yourself. And if you wanna impress your boss and stuff? I think the answer is the, delta. So the difference between, multiples, of the exit market we're getting really
[00:17:59] Mikkel: is really, Yeah. I'm like, whoa.
[00:18:01] Toni: for you know, in the US versus Europe. really kind of how I need, think about it, because in the US they are happy to pay you 10, 15, 20 x revenue and you wanna be seen then as a company. You know, it's getting those revenues versus a company that is in Europe, which usually has more and, and they're probably kind of getting closer to each other now, but usually more of a five to 10 X revenue kind
[00:18:24] Mikkel: So basically what you're saying, the same amount of revenue is worth more in the US because it trades at a different multiple.
[00:18:32] Keep it at a, you know, dumb it down for me.
[00:18:35] Toni: Yeah.
[00:18:36] Mikkel: sorry.
[00:18:37] Toni: No, but that's, that's kind of how I need to think about it. And that might, and obviously there's some risk. That's my how you might think about the premium.
[00:18:44] But now let's go to the other dimension, which is inbound versus outbound. And what you will usually see, and that might not be true actually anymore fully, but what you usually might see is that, outbound might be a bit cheaper than. Not fully true anymore, I would say. But in reality, without even thinking about that, what you probably would want to see or what you would be okay with, is to pay a little bit of a premium for inbound revenue, actually.
[00:19:14] So why is that? Well, number one. There's a bit of a crossover. You know, you need to finance the website and a couple of other things and, and the white papers and the e-books and the stuff that
[00:19:22] Mikkel: naming meeting in rooms
[00:19:24] Toni: Yeah. and the funds. Yeah. But, you know, there's a bit of spillover that basically is no true.
[00:19:31] You know, CAC in that sense. And also helps the sdr. So I think you should always be happy with a little bit of a premium. and obviously brand, brand awareness that it's really hard to price it in today. and, that's how I would actually sometimes think about it, right? So I think you should be okay to pay a bit of a premium for the revenue coming from marketing, versus outbound.
[00:19:52] They ask some more complicated arguments you could run in terms. Hayes, maybe my lifetime value is higher for marketing stuff.
[00:20:00] Mikkel: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:01] Toni: Velocity might be faster. So less money spent on processing and so forth. So there might be a couple of other more complicated ways. You might argue a way around it. but that's, that's how I'll probably, that's how I would probably see it.
[00:20:13] Right? And by the way, at this point, you have those four different buckets. You have those opinions. You're not Mr. Salesforce anymore.
[00:20:23] Mikkel: No. It's a very different conversation.
[00:20:25] Toni: It's a completely different conversation. And the, the reason you can have that conversation is you understand the engine, all the different corners, you understand the math behind it, and you bring up the math to your boss and be like, Hey, you know, we have those four options, 5, 6, 10, 20, whatever.
[00:20:40] and, I think for us to realistically hit this revenue target with a budget that we have, We probably need to make a hard decision, which is, you know, overinvesting in those two buckets versus in the others, and in some cases, Even taking money away from some buckets and putting it in the other ones.
[00:20:58] And, so that now, you know, logically speaking gives you more this typical, I hate this thing, but more bang for the buck. But what it also does, it will reduce your c payback in that moment, you know, simply by relocating resources, taking something from the expensive. Pouring it into the cheaper bucket, you will have basically achieved a better tech payback in that sense.
[00:21:22] Mikkel: I mean, we basically ended up doing it, and maybe that's like the next layer we are gonna get into. But we ended up doing it, on the marketing side, shifting around budget into Google and events. And, and it worked.
[00:21:33] Toni: So, And there's now one fundamental, So first of all, do this analysis. Honestly. Do it. and, and maybe in the first step, only go to this level.
[00:21:42] Mikkel: It can get hairy,
[00:21:43] Toni: it can get hairy one level deeper. I mean, maybe you have a strong, partnership channel or something like that. You should, you know, basically do the same thing. and by the way, in general, usually for me, and maybe that has changed now, but inbound outbound fairly close to one another.
[00:21:58] Also usually driving most of your revenues. So this will be the heavy part the CAC payback
[00:22:04] and usually ranges between 12 month K payback for very efficient companies, to 24 and above. Right. and then you have a partners, which usually come in much lower. We're talking maybe six month, 10 month, half, half of the inbound outbound stuff.
[00:22:22] And, and the reason is you don't need to pay for a lot of top funnel work.
[00:22:26] but it's also less scalable. usually it's just adding more partners is actually not the way to do it. So it's some that you, you are less in control of this channel. That's sometimes the downturn. So scalability is really the question.
[00:22:37] Yeah. then you have, upsell. Upsell usually is your cheaper buckets, cheapest bucket, in the sense of, for me it was sometimes a three month tech pay. Four month maybe. and for others, depending on how they do the math, maybe they don't have account managers. Sometimes it's, you know, half a month K payback.
[00:22:57] Right. So this is, this is how your landscape will look like across channels usually. Hmm.
[00:23:04] Mikkel: I mean, so, so this analysis, wouldn't it almost get you an, you know, a guest appearance at the table if you do it right?
[00:23:14] Toni: I think so. I think so. and, and now maybe, maybe we talk about what would be challenging questions. That maybe that could be fun actually. So one question is, Okay, cool. so let's double click on marketing. where would you allocate the cash differently In marketing? Right. That you, you could basically be on, you know, this one level inbound outbound, maybe that's, But maybe someone will ask you.
[00:23:39] Well, we really don't have outbound. Yeah. And we don't believe in it. We don't wanna build it out. so it's still one dimensional, inbound versus, I don't know, upsell. and upsell. That's kind of capped in terms you know, your tactics. So then you get into this whole marketing machinery of what, what you wanna, scale there.
[00:23:58] Right. I think that could be a question that might, might lead to blank stares on, on your side,
[00:24:04] Mikkel: but I think it's also a great question to get because you know what you're gonna say.
[00:24:09] You know what? I would love to go and do the analysis
[00:24:13] and then, then actually if you, if you can manage to do it, you go do it. Or you, you know, talk about the fact, do you actually have the resources you need, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe don't turn it into a
[00:24:23] Toni: No, no, no, no. People don't
[00:24:25] Mikkel: But it's a positive thing.
[00:24:26] Toni: Yeah. I think what you can do as a one-off, they're also on the marketing is and there's a couple of more things to consider, so it's sometimes a little bit shitty.
[00:24:36] but to try and follow your gut a little bit and your gut will probably be talking about, maybe your paid social spend and you will be like, Hey, I don't think this paid social thing is working out, or you're looking into, some of the, webinar and white paper download leads. You know, and, and that will probably push you into a little bit of a rabbit hole.
[00:25:02] but the, the, the basic idea is kind of the same thing, right? You basically take, instead of saying just inbound yeah. You're basically saying, Okay, let's look at the, webinars and white paper downloads. again, whenever I go down on this rant here, I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying your tactics around it should probably change.
[00:25:22] So the, the, the, the point is you have all of those non hand razor leads coming in.
[00:25:29] Toni: Maybe you put even some ad dollars against it to push for it. and maybe you get a bunch of interests, maybe you get thousands of, of different leads, right? So the next step is, CMO says, Hey, I have all of those fantastic leads.
[00:25:43] Some of them are actually even a fit. now. Here, SDR team being managed by sales leader, go call all of those leads. And what is so baffling to me, and I've seen this now, not only in, in the companies I worked at, but also, you know, a couple of others. leads tend to perform poorer. And everyone was like then in, you know, then demo request.
[00:26:06] Well that's for sure. But they tend to perform poorer than outbound. Yep.
[00:26:12] Mikkel: It is a bit mind blowing, but I think it's also the approach and, and think about it, you invested in something where someone engaged with you and your brand, they got some knowledge and then they get a pitch that's not, remember, not what they're expecting at that stage.
[00:26:25] Toni: I think actually, so I've been thinking about this for so long because it's such a nice mind twister.
[00:26:29] I think you get the worst of both worlds, basically. What, what do I mean with that? Well, on, on the outbound side, you have people that don't know you. But you can be super targeted. That's great. That's how you balance it on the, inbound world, generally speaking, not just the white paper stuff. You have very loose targeting.
[00:26:49] You get the shape of the market kind of with exceptions. but they know you and then they convert nicely. So you kind of, you know, both things balance out nicely. But with the white paper downloads, you kind of get the, the, the messy middle in between, which is people that, you know, you didn't target.
[00:27:05] and, they're not ready to buy. So basically both things are kind of shitty. And then re but that basically then leads to worse results in the end. Right? Any who kind of going through that analysis, what you will probably be doing is kind of, Hey, you have those webinar leads, maybe you're able to.
[00:27:23] and this needs work with your, marketing leader because this is now stuff where it can't just say all marketing costs. It needs to be well, who Exactly. And how much money and so forth. and I think this is a great one off, you know, analysis to really kind of go deep, dive into this and also build a relationship maybe with that marketing leader.
[00:27:41] And then say, Okay, how many leads did we get? How many opportunities did it take? How much revenue did we get out of it? And then you stack against it, the money it took to get those leads. the work it took from those reps, that had to call these leads. and then, you know, the opportunities coming out and closing and how much time that took from the a if you sum all of that thing up, chances are, will be a very terrible c payback equation in the end.
[00:28:11] and, and that can be a really nice lead into, Okay, maybe we should broaden this, where should we put this money instead and so forth.
[00:28:19] Mikkel: Right. And I think, by the way, if this is happening at, you know, the company you're working in, there's a lot of leads being created in marketing and nothing happens on the sales side.
[00:28:28] It's a pretty good sign that there's a misalignment in how you go to market two teams. Right. That's really what it is. and, and that's where it becomes very powerful to, to just look at CAC payback. Because you might realize if you, if you told this to the VP of marketing, You know what we've spent, I dunno, 200 k last this year so far on, you know, sponsoring eBooks and webinars.
[00:28:50] We've gotten one customer, we could spend all that money building the brand instead.
[00:28:55] Toni: so, and here's, here's where some of these mind twisters sit in. So number one, sometimes, and I hate to say it sometimes sales feedback is great feedback.
[00:29:05] If your sales reps are not keen on those leads, there's something wrong with those leads. I'm telling you.
[00:29:09] Mikkel: If they're stumbling over each other to get them Then you know,
[00:29:13] Toni: And then the other thing is once, and this is now we're going to this demand and you know, magic land. But once you realize, okay, maybe we should have spent those 200 k.
[00:29:23] Putting this ebook together and blah, blah, blah, and you know, pushing it out. Maybe that is the right thing, but those leads coming out of it, you know, simply not worth it. Because basically you gate the, you gated this thing and you know, for someone to get it, they need to give their, you need to create themselves as a lead, basically.
[00:29:41] They just ungate the whole thing. Suddenly you will have much wider distribution. You know, suddenly you're kind of hitting many more people. And that's kind of what I'm sometimes saying is like, Don't shift the, don't shift the purpose in between. In some of those, in some of those campaigns, it's like, yes, you know, we are doing this to do brand recognition.
[00:29:58] Well, if that is true, then take the sign up form away if you have the, or the, you know, basically the lead capture, if you have the lead capture in there, it will become a lead and it will be handed like lead and it won't work out. You should probably do a different asset altogether. but anyway, so this is, this is maybe drifting here, but again, that could be a cool kind of, Inside to the VP Marketing, honestly.
[00:30:20] And again, that's, that's the relationship building that you know, is that stepping stone for you to become a strategic partner at the end of the day is being able to have those conversations. And I think that's the beauty of starting to split down opportunities, whether you do it by region or by emotion or whatever.
[00:30:36] And then understanding where do you get, you know, most opportunities for less cost.
[00:30:42] Absolutely. And. I think one, one other tangent here potentially to go out on is really the, okay, now maybe the, the CMO bought into the fact that, you know, this is not a great tactic.
[00:30:57] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:30:58] Toni: He or she might ask. So what else should we do?
[00:31:01] Right? You do the whole analysis and you find out now, and there will be a messy conversation about attribution in the middle there. I'm gonna skip over this for a second, but you will come to the realization that, direct traffic and if you're really, really good at this branded search, those two things as a combined bucket together, we'll have the best ke payback for.
[00:31:22] As, as a whole organization. And then the big question is like, okay, cool. How do I scale that though?
[00:31:29] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:31:30] Toni: How do I scale direct and brand search? And, the answer is, you, you know, the way you got to have that bucket in the first place is did all the other spend, you know, you tell, you told people who you are, where you are on the market, what the problems you're attacking, how you're solving it, and then over time that comeback.
[00:31:48] But you will digitally. Be very challenged in connecting those two things to one another, which is, which is making this a super messy problem. But to be honest, I think you as a rev op person should be aware that that problem exists. and you should then basically kind of step away and give this to the VP marketing guys, because those are the ones that need to figure that problem out, Right?
[00:32:11] Unlike. Which I've seen sometimes, someone working in finance comparing invoices from Google versus Facebook, going into quick attribution on Salesforce and saying, Hey, from Facebook's Facebook, we basically don't get anything from Google. We get a lot, Let's put more money into Google. And I think this is, this is where those finance folks, overstepping.
[00:32:33] In my, in my opinion and my experience, and you as RevOps should, should know where your knowledge stops. And it stops right there. stop, stop giving advice to our VP marketing. It's a dangerous game to play in that sense.
[00:32:47] Mikkel: And also the VP marketing is higher to figure it out. It's much better for that person to then ask, Hey, can we look into this area?
[00:32:53] What is your, you know, take if they ask for it.
[00:32:56] Toni: Yeah, exactly. And if, if that's not the right VP marketing, then that's a different conversation. Probably you won't be looped into
[00:33:03] Mikkel: No, probably not. But, so, you know, this is, this is the stepping stone basically to, to become more strategic.
[00:33:12] Toni: I think so, and I think obviously, you know, once you've done this, maybe you wanna do it again when when's instrumented and so forth.
[00:33:21] And I think, this is, this is then the stepping stone towards an operating model actually, so this is, This is almost also a little bit the story of Olfo and Toni figuring out some things and then presenting it to C level and then the board and getting buy-in and you know, all of that stuff.
[00:33:42] Mikkel: So you weren't just lying with numbers.
[00:33:45] Toni: I mean,
[00:33:46] Mikkel: you got me? Yes. Finally, Redemption. But, hope this was helpful. Thank you so much for sharing some tips with our audience here yet again. And, Thank you for listening. Thanks guys. Bye.