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How’d You Get That Number?! is the show that asks B2B SaaS leaders one simple question: where did that goal actually come from?
Hosted by Daren Ladua and brought to you by Outset, each episode unpacks how career-defining KPIs, revenue targets, and growth goals were set in the first place and what happened next.
If you're building go-to-market teams or chasing big numbers, this is the real story behind the metrics.
[00:00:00] Rachel Trindade: To get the resources that you need and to get the people ramped that you need. It can be really challenging because you know how long it takes to hire people. Oftentimes, you're looking at least three months, if not more, and then you've gotta actually get them. Functional and contributing, and so well-intentioned numbers without the proper planning can often lead to some pretty significant challenges.
[00:00:25] Daren Lauda: You are listening to How'd You Get That Number? brought to you by Outset. This is the show where B2B SaaS leaders break down the real stories behind the goals, KPIs, and revenue targets that shape their careers. And how those numbers were set in the first place. I'm your host, Daren Lauda.
[00:00:45] Daren Lauda: Excited to be here with Rachel Trindade today. Rachel is the CMO at FlavorCloud. Did I say that right? That is correct. Fantastic. Uh, Rachel and I had the chance to work together a past life for four years. Uh, she ran a little marketing, I kind of ran the Americas. And uh, I always love working with Rachel and I'm really excited to be talking with her today.
[00:01:05] Daren Lauda: Rachel, welcome to the show. Why don't you introduce yourself to the listeners?
[00:01:09] Rachel Trindade: Sure. Thanks Daren. Really excited to be here to chat with you. This is such a super fun topic because I am one of those strange marketers that also has kind of the rev ops experience and a little bit of sales, just enough to be dangerous.
[00:01:23] Rachel Trindade: Um, to do a super quick introduction about me, Rachel Trinidade, I have done pretty much everything across the go-to-market side of the business. So I spent the last 20, uh, 20 years doing everything from. Marketing, product management, sales, revenue operations. Um, obviously ended up in marketing. Really love marketing.
[00:01:42] Rachel Trindade: Um, I like to say product marketing is my home because I love to get to know the buyers and the market. Um, but demand generation is my passion. So I like working hand in hand with the sales leaders being directly responsible for those numbers and seeing those impacts on the business.
[00:01:59] Daren Lauda: It's fantastic. You started with, I'm kind of a strange type of marketer.
[00:02:01] Daren Lauda: I was gonna say, is that because you like working with sales? A bad joke in there. Um, the old sales and marketing conflict. But you and I, um, I always enjoyed working with you because, um, but what you just described, um, whether it's the product, the demand generation interaction with sales, I really enjoyed working with you and I'm glad we're doing this today.
[00:02:18] Daren Lauda: It's gonna be a lot of fun.
[00:02:20] Rachel Trindade: Yeah, this is really exciting. I've, I've been with some high dynamic high growth organizations before, and you get some of the most interesting numbers there.
[00:02:29] Daren Lauda: Oh, yeah. Well, let's talk about that. One of the things I always like to start with is about a crazy number. What's kind of the craziest number you ever had to latch onto?
[00:02:37] Daren Lauda: Whether it was given to you, what did you do? Did you fight it? Did you walk away? How did you achieve it? Talk about a crazy one.
[00:02:45] Rachel Trindade: You know, since we started having a conversation about me coming on this podcast and talking to you about this, I was trying to give it a little bit of thought because we've all had those really crazy numbers and I had two situations where I.
[00:02:59] Rachel Trindade: You would've called them crazy numbers, but they played out so incredibly differently. Okay. And so, you know, the, the core to it was I was asked to bring in essentially a hundred percent coverage of the market for that year. Meaning of all the companies in the market that are not currently in contract, that have adopted the solution that we were providing, we needed to bring in every single one of them From a marketing standpoint.
[00:03:28] Daren Lauda: Oh wait, run the table and close the deals or get them aware of you. Tell me what that means.
[00:03:32] Rachel Trindade: Okay. From a marketing perspective, meaning Yes. Okay. Bring in all of the MQ ls that you might need. So I'm just gonna say the names have been changed to protect the innocent here. So not gonna give you the specific company, but going to give you a very specific situation.
[00:03:48] Rachel Trindade: So I was in a very fast growing B2B SaaS organization and. We had done really, really well one year, you know, my first year there and then the next year there we're like, we've gotta up the numbers, we've gotta up the numbers. That means we've gotta increase the M qls. And so kind of from the top they said, we've gotta bring in this re this specific revenue number, and we're just gonna work through the funnel metrics to get back to how many M qls we needed.
[00:04:15] Rachel Trindade: And they come up with the total number of MQL and, and I'm thinking, okay, well this doesn't work quite well, so. I'll use an imaginary number. Say there are 24,000 companies in the market that are even in the potential market of them, a third of them are too small. We're not gonna go after them.
[00:04:38] Rachel Trindade: They're not gonna spend the money, they're not going to invest at that time. Okay, great. Then, you know, from there. You've got another group of them that, um, has in-house solutions, so they're not changing, highly unlikely to change. So we've got about 80% of the remaining markets. So we're now down to about 12,000 potential targets.
[00:05:00] Rachel Trindade: Okay? Now most of them are in two to three year contracts, which means theoretically you would have anywhere from 33% to 50% of those in the market every single year. So that brings you down to say it's every two years, 50%, that brings you down to 6,000 Now. On onsite, we're gonna run an outbound process also now, so we hadn't had outbound before, and that's gonna take about 14 to 1500 of those opportunities outta marketing's hands that we can't market to them in that year at that time.
[00:05:38] Rachel Trindade: So we're now down to anywhere between 4,000 to 5,500 total potential opportunities. So MQL target was right around 5,500. No,
[00:05:51] Daren Lauda: we're gonna get 'em all
[00:05:53] Rachel Trindade: so fantastic. Um, ideally that sounds like a great thing, but at the same time I was in a market where there are a lot of other companies that have just received, um, additional funding.
[00:06:05] Rachel Trindade: It's super competitive. At the same time, we are ramping from a very, very small team. We need to add additional functionality. We had already tapped out on some of the core channels that we're using in terms of. Saturation and we were starting to hit the laws of diminishing returns.
[00:06:23] Daren Lauda: Let's pause there for a second 'cause there's a lot going on here.
[00:06:26] Daren Lauda: Universe of 24,000. Yes. We cut it down to about 6,000. We gave 1500 to an outbound team that didn't exist and hadn't done the work before. We kept 4,500 to 5,500 to ourself and we said we're gonna find them in a market that's already saturated. Saturated to, to a high degree. Pretty much so, pretty much, right.
[00:06:46] Daren Lauda: Okay, hey, let's do it. Let's, let's do it.
[00:06:48] Rachel Trindade: There are definitely always nuances to that, but it's, it's really saying, Hey, you've gotta have a hundred percent market coverage of every single company that's gonna go out to bid for your service this year.
[00:06:59] Daren Lauda: That's awesome. And how did that work? What did you guys do?
[00:07:02] Daren Lauda: You had the outbound motion, what'd you do from there?
[00:07:05] Rachel Trindade: Um, or we
[00:07:06] Daren Lauda: had the start of an outbound motion. I guess,
[00:07:08] Rachel Trindade: you know, frankly, the CRO and I had some interesting conversations. Um, we were definitely in lockstep about how we thought we should approach things, and, and we did push back a little bit saying, I'm not sure that this is entirely realistic.
[00:07:20] Rachel Trindade: I. For us for this year, um, certainly we have been given pretty good investment to put into the business, which was great, but we didn't have the teams, we hadn't ramped the people yet. There were certain systems that needed to be improved as well. And so we did go back, have conversation with our CCFO, our CEO.
[00:07:41] Rachel Trindade: We made some headway there in terms of, of adjusting some of the overall targets, but. I think you've probably in been in a situation where, yeah, we'll, we'll adjust some of these targets. But you know, if you just get some efficiency in this part of the funnel and in this part of the funnel and in this part of the funnel, you should be fine.
[00:08:02] Rachel Trindade: And as we know, you oftentimes can impact one or two parts of the funnel, but when you start layering those in and making that a core part of your goal, you might have some challenges.
[00:08:16] Daren Lauda: Well, and let's face it from the sales and marketing point of view. Look, Rashan, and I love our friends in finance, but you guys are really good at saying, look how much you can do with no investment versus some investment.
[00:08:26] Daren Lauda: And sometimes those efficiency metrics overweight a little too much into the calculation. Mm-hmm.
[00:08:31] Rachel Trindade: Yeah, and you know what? I've been really lucky in that I've been with some well-funded organizations that I've been willing to put in the money. It's just oftentimes those investments come a little bit late, so you've agreed to a target.
[00:08:44] Rachel Trindade: You don't actually get your target until, I don't know, mid-January. Late January, maybe February sometimes, but so you already start a little bit behind, behind the target, and then to get the resources that you need and to get the people ramped that you need. It can be really challenging because you know how long it takes to hire people.
[00:09:03] Rachel Trindade: Oftentimes you're looking at least three months, if not more, and then you've gotta actually get them. Functional and contributing, and so well-intentioned numbers without the proper planning can often lead to some pretty significant challenges.
[00:09:20] Daren Lauda: Exactly. Okay. So you had to fix systems, you had to partner with the CRO, you had to bring some people in.
[00:09:26] Daren Lauda: As you chase this 4,500 to 5,500 MQL member, where did it go? Did you guys pull it off? How did it work out?
[00:09:34] Rachel Trindade: We were lucky in the first half of the year that we had some really nice tailwinds that were supporting us, um, some really nice tailwinds that were supporting us. So we were running really well through the first half of the year.
[00:09:46] Rachel Trindade: Um, and the second half of the year we started to see some more significant headwinds, and we ended up probably about 20% off of the number that we were supposed to achieve. Now we didn't necessarily get the total M QLS that we needed, but we did have some great things happening from a conversion standpoint.
[00:10:02] Rachel Trindade: And you know, we were working really well with the sales organization to close a lot of what was coming in-house.
[00:10:09] Daren Lauda: Fantastic. Did the bookings number get achieved? Do we get enough M QLS to get the SQLs to get the number?
[00:10:15] Rachel Trindade: So similarly to the MQL Miss, we had, we ended up, um, being a little bit sluggish in the second half and, and coming in, we, we fell short of the number.
[00:10:25] Rachel Trindade: The good thing is that we learned from it, we did a little bit better, um, planning together. We not only did top down, but we also did a bottoms up and, um, it was a more collaborative effort. I wouldn't say that there weren't some stretch targets, uh, in, in future years, but there was definitely, um, a more collaborative effort across the, the leadership team to make numbers that we all felt a little more comfortable with.
[00:10:50] Daren Lauda: Yeah, I love hearing that. You know, um, one of the things I spent a lot of time on is planning these days, um, and making sure you build a really good bottoms up plan, a really good top down plan. You think about the reforecast midyear because it seems to always come right. Something's going to happen and whether it's caused by us or happens to us, and I don't mean that in a negative way, but maybe we have a pro launch that takes precedence.
[00:11:14] Daren Lauda: We have to put dollars elsewhere. And people, you know, there's the push and the pull internally and they lose a few dollars or a few resources during that planning exercise. That mid-year repu exercise, um, is so important to long-term success. I'm, I'm glad to hear that the outcome of maybe not the result you wanted was more effective planning going forward so that you didn't find yourself in this, uh, same spot.
[00:11:33] Daren Lauda: That's really excellent. Mm-hmm.
[00:11:35] Rachel Trindade: And it was more effective planning, but it wasn't the best planning process that I worked.
[00:11:40] Daren Lauda: Okay. More effective? Not yet. Perfect. Okay. I'll buy into that. I'll buy into that.
[00:11:45] Rachel Trindade: Yeah.
[00:11:45] Daren Lauda: Very cool. You said there were two examples, I think, right? Was there another, am I, am I pulling you forward to the next one too fast?
[00:11:53] Rachel Trindade: No, actually I, I think this is the perfect timing for it because I was. At a company, and I must say I was responsible for, um, sales and rev ops at the time, so I was one of the people giving that crazy number out to people. And I even remember those conversations with the individual salespeople, like, are you kidding me?
[00:12:17] Rachel Trindade: Is this realistic? And um, and having those debates with, at the different sales directors about what we were gonna do. But it was the one company that I've been in that we actually did at all bottoms up. And so, yeah, so it was actually pretty interesting and it was great because it was an opportunity where we had.
[00:12:36] Rachel Trindade: Access to every single company in the US as a potential target. So it was really easy to pull like the Dun and Bradstreet information about all of those different companies. We could slice and dice it based on employee size. Overall, um, you know, for enterprise, we could say, okay, if you are an enterprise rep, you get 160 companies to 200 companies in your territory.
[00:13:00] Rachel Trindade: If you're a mid-size rep, you're gonna get between five and 600 companies you can target, and then SMB is just gonna take anything that's reactive coming in from there. And so we actually did sign up for what we believed to be a hundred percent of the market from a visibility standpoint and from trying to bring in from a lead generation standpoint and.
[00:13:22] Rachel Trindade: Used very realistic funnel metrics to get to what our target was for that year. And I have to say, I was pretty proud. We came in at 96% of what we wanted to do from a bookings number all the way across the board. And so. Wasn't a hundred percent, but at the same time, you know what, when you put a really lofty target out there and you work hand in hand with the people across marketing, sales, revenue, operations to make it happen, you can do some pretty incredible things.
[00:13:55] Daren Lauda: Yeah. You know, it's funny, the salesperson in me and, and the, the executive in me is always, there's only red or green. There's no yellow. You make the number or you don't. Mm-hmm. But the realist, realistic kind of thing for me also is when we set big audacious goals mm-hmm. We tend to stretch ourselves. If I seminar do 90, um, and do 92, that's great.
[00:14:14] Daren Lauda: If I seminar to do a hundred and do 98, that's even better. Um, in a lot of ways, right? So I like to have that culture winning where we hit numbers, but I do like those big audacious goals. Um, and when we do something amazing, I wanna make sure we still celebrate it, even if it isn't 100% per se. I, I held my idea.
[00:14:32] Daren Lauda: I had an SDR say with everyone on the phone, and I have an idea. I hold it so I don't forget it. And so I held my idea. I pinched it right between these two fingers. You send the bottoms up CLA side. I sounded like you worked really well across. I'm just curious how that came together to build towards that 90, uh, 96% attainment.
[00:14:47] Daren Lauda: Did marketing do its own bottom up and then sales do it. So then compare, how did you bring the salad together, all the components, you know, to the croutons and the dressing. It all worked really well.
[00:14:57] Rachel Trindade: So, um, I would say like we started with just looking at overall market coverage and how we needed to cover the market and coming up with what were those total numbers based on what the adoption in the market was, uh, based on what, um, you know, the average contracts were in the market.
[00:15:17] Rachel Trindade: From there, what our funnel metrics aligned as. And those were all things that we did along the way. So with our CRO, we sat down with all of the sales directors, we sat down with our head of marketing, um, myself, and we went through all of those assumptions together so that we knew that we were aligned and we built those assumptions based on the individual market.
[00:15:42] Rachel Trindade: So if we were looking at enterprise, what were our written rates there? How did that actually look? You know, if, if we had to close six deals in each of those enterprise territories. What was the average size going to be? We made sure that we were aligned on all of the assumptions upfront. And so I think that's where we got to, okay, this is a really aggressive goal, but this is something that's actually doable for us.
[00:16:07] Rachel Trindade: And so every single one of us got involved in that process. And you know, even from a marketing standpoint, we had to realign territories and everything based on what we could bring in by the individual lead generation that we thought we could do in those individual state territories.
[00:16:27] Daren Lauda: So you really understood the, kind of the whole funnel flow.
[00:16:29] Daren Lauda: You understood the conversion points, um, you made great assumptions. It led to a goal that was a really nice attainment, which sort talked about one kind of, I dunno if nitpicky is the right question, but detailed question. When the year gets going, did you have a process in place to watch assumptions as they changed?
[00:16:47] Daren Lauda: I see somebody who build a plan and they set variables in fourth quarter of last year. They get to third quarter of this year. Why aren't things working? Oh yeah, the spreadsheet from last year. So has the old variables. Did you guys have a way to keep those living?
[00:16:59] Rachel Trindade: Oh, absolutely. So we had an incredibly disciplined, um, sales metrics review process.
[00:17:06] Rachel Trindade: We did at a monthly level. We did the monthly review of all of the individual metrics for each of the individual teams, but we had all of the sales pipeline calls where we would review that for individual salespeople and review their metrics and how it aligned with others. So we would even look at the number of open leads, the speed to lead by individual rep as well on basically a weekly basis to ensure that we were getting the conversions that we needed out of the individual team members.
[00:17:38] Daren Lauda: I love hearing that. Uh, all too often in my experience, and look as a sales leader, I've been guilty of this. I set the assumptions and I go 4, 6, 8 weeks before I sanity check to make sure my assumption is held, assumption is held true, and then all of a sudden you're in trouble. I love that weekly cadence.
[00:17:53] Daren Lauda: Looking at it really frequently and as a team, um, and challenging when conversion points fail. I made a lot of that, those kinda mistakes of not doing that early. It sounds like you caught onto that before. I did. Which, um, I'm envious of
[00:18:05] Rachel Trindade: it. Just everything was clicking in that specific organization and that function and what I'll say is it works a lot better for mid-size and small to be looking at it that closely on such a regular basis.
[00:18:17] Rachel Trindade: There were some enterprise surprises that came in there because you can look at things week over week and someone closes two huge deals and it changes everything in those metrics. And so especially, you know, when you have deals that take anywhere from 12 to 18 months, whereas you know, a mid-size has taken three months small as.
[00:18:38] Rachel Trindade: Taking, you know, anywhere from a week to maybe a month. It's really easy to manage those metrics on the week to week basis. But enterprise is frankly where we had a few scary moments, but we pulled it up.
[00:18:52] Daren Lauda: That's awesome. And enterprise is where you have to look at kind of as the year progresses, you get those two big deals, um, that you didn't expect early.
[00:18:59] Daren Lauda: Can you plummet through in your assumptions and assume you're gonna get five more in the second half, or do you constrain a lot of debate to have there? I'm guessing.
[00:19:08] Rachel Trindade: So we kept the quotas where they were, even if someone closed it early in the year. And the good thing was comp plan had really nice accelerators.
[00:19:18] Rachel Trindade: So if they continue to close deals, um, they would make up for that. But you always know you've got the 80 20 rule, so you're gonna have one person, you know, you might have a couple people who hit it out of the ballpark and crush their number, and you're gonna have a couple people who. Miss it miserably.
[00:19:36] Rachel Trindade: And so we didn't change the assumptions. Um, we knew that there were gonna be people that performed well in places where we had wins and there were gonna be places where, um, we had those losses also, and definitely didn't wanna over commit there.
[00:19:52] Daren Lauda: Okay. So we just went through two really cool scenarios on software companies.
[00:19:57] Daren Lauda: Your husband, as I recall, has a really neat business. He has almost an industrial technology facility where people can come in and build things, uh, with lots of different tools of CNC machines, like all sorts of crazy stuff. This might be a weird question, but, but how did you and he think about numbers when you were launching your own entrepreneurial business?
[00:20:20] Rachel Trindade: So that's a great question. And what I, I'll say, I'll say upfront that we are one of the couples that believes that we don't, shouldn't work together. And so while I will provide, share some of my experiences, we don't always go through all the numbers for his business together. Steve runs an incredible business, uh, urban workshop.
[00:20:41] Rachel Trindade: It's a makerspace that's, uh, based here in Southern California and. Um, it's really incredible. He's recently launched a welding program specifically where they can do American Welding Society certifications, and I think that this is probably one of the areas where he's had to build a net new sales process for it direct to consumer and, um, maybe some more of the hobbyists, maybe some of the more startups who need a place who to go and use all of that equipment.
[00:21:11] Rachel Trindade: And so for welding, a lot of it is, it's. Uh, based on how much equipment do you have available, how many potential classes that you can actually have, what types of certifications, what sort of tests that people can actually do there. And so building out that plan, a lot of it is based on potential because you don't necessarily have historicals there.
[00:21:36] Rachel Trindade: And so, you know, that's one of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about is, well, this is potential. What does ramping actually look like for it? And so that's something that they continue to work through. He's got his first sales person who's helping to build the business, build the we, the welding side of the business.
[00:21:55] Rachel Trindade: And so he's learning a lot of it right now and really putting together a lot of the funnel metrics for that side of the business so that he can start forecasting and looking forward. The really awesome thing about Steve is that he's always looking forward, so he's always adjusting. He's always adjusting based on what he's learned in prior months and trying to adjust the plans accordingly.
[00:22:16] Rachel Trindade: It's been really interesting watching him through this journey of trying to build out the whole sales and funnel process for it.
[00:22:23] Daren Lauda: I love hearing that. I asked for, I asked the question, um, kind of deliberately, and sorry, I surprised you with it. We're in a world now where some people, and I don't wanna get into it all here, but are questioning, do I do go to college?
[00:22:33] Daren Lauda: Do I do a trade, do I do something more entrepreneurial? What's interesting is, even though we're talking about kind of an industrial technology center, I. And a welding program, a lot of the constructs still apply. How am I gonna build my funnel? What are the conversion rate? How's it gonna flow? And I just wanna make sure that, you know, anybody listening to this knows that we talk about, how’d you get that number.
[00:22:52] Daren Lauda: It doesn't matter if you're a plumber or a welder or a CMO at a software company. There's a lot of work to be done to get all this right.
[00:23:00] Rachel Trindade: Absolutely. I, you know, he implemented HubSpot recently and he's talking about all of his click funnels and its conversion rates and. Oh, I've just launched these ads.
[00:23:11] Rachel Trindade: Should I be getting, get better click-through rates on them and everything, so, oh, we actually get to have some fun marketing conversations, um, as well. But you're absolutely right. It is, it applies to almost any business that you're in.
[00:23:23] Daren Lauda: It really does. And like you, my wife and I have a rule that we don't work together.
[00:23:28] Daren Lauda: That's, so we met at work, we've kept a separation ever since, but who knows where We'll go over time. Look, I'm really enjoying the conversation. Um, I wanna come back and ask you a big question here in just a second. Uh, before I do that, I wanna give a shout out to our sponsor who's sponsoring today's episode.
[00:23:43] Daren Lauda: Today's episode is sponsored by ekai. ekai delivers your AI twin at work built from every conversation to move work forward even when you're not in the room. It captures your meetings. It tracks your action items so you don't forget them, and it acts on them like drafting your follow ups automatically or answering repeated questions for you so you don't have to.
[00:24:02] Daren Lauda: If you're team's stuck in meeting overload or buried in busy work, try ekai free for seven days. It might just turn complaints about too many meetings into conversations about new ideas. Use referral code HYGTN to get started. How'd You Get That Number? HYGTN. Okay. Rachel? So I stole this question directly from another podcaster who I should give credit to, but I can't think of their name right now.
[00:24:26] Daren Lauda: But basically it goes like this. What's the one thing in go to market tech that we're not talking about right now that we should be?
[00:24:34] Rachel Trindade: Oh, there are so many things, but as a marketer, one thing really jumps to mind, I think especially in say B2B SaaS. We had this kind of shift where everything was demand generation, and I love demand generation.
[00:24:49] Rachel Trindade: That's fantastic. You get to the point where you start to measure every single dollar that's spent and you want return on every dollar that's spent. And so you can have the most beautiful demand generation engine that brings people through the funnel, but you may not actually have that true awareness with them.
[00:25:08] Rachel Trindade: So you're starting to see in marketing a lot of the more, you know, the B2B Tech companies start thinking more about branding again because they shortchange branding. Because they thought, okay, well I'm gonna put the dollars where I can see the return on it. But what happens with that is there's something that I like to call effective frequency, or not that I like to call, but it's an industry known, um, term called effective frequency, which is the number of times you need to hear something in a similar way before you actually commit it to memory.
[00:25:41] Rachel Trindade: And for most people it's anywhere from seven to 27 times. And in your traditional demand generation engine, you. Sometimes can do that, but not always. So you may get someone into the pipeline, but they may not have any preference for you yet because they don't have that knowledge, they don't have that familiarity.
[00:26:02] Rachel Trindade: They don't have that emotional connection to your brand yet. And so you're seeing a lot of organizations go back to say. I think I need to invest more in my brand now. I think I need to understand my messaging and positioning better. I think I need to make sure that people all the way around my organization are aligned in the way that they're talking about things, so that when someone actually gets into the funnel that we are consistent that.
[00:26:28] Rachel Trindade: It aligns with what they already perceive of us from a brand that they come in with a positive impression of us. So you have to have a, a balanced marketing approach. It can't only be demand gen, you ha, you can't forget the branding component of it. And that's something that I feel like, frankly, in the last five to 10 years, it's all growth, all demand gen, which is fantastic because there's been so much evolution.
[00:26:51] Rachel Trindade: But at the same time, we've forgotten a little bit about brand.
[00:26:54] Daren Lauda: I agree with you for two major reasons, I, one of which I should probably apologize to you for in a past life, I got so hooked on a return on advertising spend metric, and I'm like, kill that channel, kill that channel. Let's just do this. And that works for a few months.
[00:27:09] Daren Lauda: And then banks taper really hard, um, when you over focus on demand gen that way. But number two, there's this race towards things like AI based outbound. And if your messaging isn't spot on, and if the brand isn't right, all you're really doing is spamming at scale and making people frustrated as opposed to inviting people into what you do.
[00:27:28] Daren Lauda: At least that's how I feel about it.
[00:27:30] Rachel Trindade: Totally agree. I. So you mentioned that situation about the ROI on specific programs. Um, I recently dealt with that as well in that I was told we need to cut all of our advertising and all of the industry publications that we were in, not in this front role, but, and when we did that, we started seeing all that direct website traffic decrease, and that was one of our strongest converting channels.
[00:27:56] Rachel Trindade: And so everyone's like, well get the web traffic back up and direct, unfortunately, is one of those things where it's really hard to tell where direct traffic comes from because they already know your name. They went straight to your website, so you can't always tell where that actually came from. And while.
[00:28:13] Rachel Trindade: You can prove correlation on some of these things. You can't prove causation, and it becomes really difficult because people don't understand why this one channel isn't performing, but it's because you've stopped investing over here where that's typically what would drive that. But because you can't prove causation, people don't wanna invest in it.
[00:28:33] Daren Lauda: I fell into that trap, hook, line, and sinker. I dove into that whole head first and watched everything else kind of degrade for a while for the audience. Rachel was there to pick me up, dust me off, and make sure we gotta go in the right direction to begin. So thank you for that. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today.
[00:28:47] Daren Lauda: I really enjoyed the conversation. Um, it's always a pleasure to catch up with you, Rachel, if people wanna connect with you somehow, where do they find you?
[00:28:53] Rachel Trindade: You can find me, uh, on LinkedIn, Rachel Trindade, spelled like Rachel. Um, I think I'm one of the only ones in there, so, um, you should be able to find me fairly easily.
[00:29:03] Rachel Trindade: Uh, if you're interested in learning more about FlavorCloud, you can of course go to flavorcloud.com and learn about how we help companies, um, unlock global commerce. Thank you. Awesome so much for having me on here, Daren.
[00:29:15] Daren Lauda: Oh, thanks for joining us. We had a great time talking to you, Rachel. Thanks so much.
[00:29:18] Daren Lauda: We'll talk to you again soon.
[00:29:19] Rachel Trindade: Thanks. Take care.
[00:29:22] Daren Lauda: That's it for this episode of How'd you Get That Number? Make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Daren Lauda. Thanks for listening. See you next time.